The theater of the universe

Christo and Jeanne-Claude - The pair is best known for their massive art installations, often using nylon or woven fabric to highlight buildings or works of nature. Their most recent project (2005), “The Gates,” consisted of 7,503 16-foot-tall steel gates with suspended swaths of saffron-colored nylon that snaked through 23 miles of paths in Central Park. While art may not seem like an area rife with negotiation, the nature of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s large-scale works invariably requires coordinating with a variety of stakeholders including local, state, and federal officials, community groups, environmentalists, landowners, and the general public.



The two received the 2008 Great Negotiator Award on Sept. 23 from the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School, which recognizes those who have made lasting contributions to the fields of negotiation and dispute resolution.

The couple met in Paris in 1958 and have been together ever since, working in tandem to realize their grand-scale visions. Their projects are entirely self-financed, backed by the sale of Christo’s early sketches, drawings, and collages of his projects.





Critical examination of major developments in European and American art during the past century. Surveys art's engagements with modernization, radical politics, utopianism, mass culture, changing conceptions of mind and human nature, new technologies, colonialism and postcolonialism, and other significant aspects of recent history.






Valley Curtain, Rifle, Colorado 1970-72 - on August 10, 1972, in Rifle, Colorado, between Grand Junction and Glenwood Spring in the Grand Hogback Mountain Range, at 11 am, a group of 35 construction workers and 64 temporary helpers, art schools, college students, and itinerant art workers tied down the last of 27 ropes that secured the 12,780 square meters (142,000 square feet) of woven nylon fabric orange Curtain to its moorings at Rifle Gap, 7 miles (11.3 km) north of Rifle, on Highway 325.

Valley Curtain, was designed by Dimiter Zagoroff and John Thomson of Unipolycon of Lynn, Massachusetts, and Dr. Ernest C. Harris of Ken R. White Company, Denver, Colorado. It was built by A-and-H Builders Inc. of Boulder, Colorado,President, Theodore Dougherty, under the site supervision of Henry B. Leininger.





By suspending the Valley Curtain, at a width of 381 meters (1,250 feet) and a height curving from 111 meters (365 feet) at each end to 55.5 meters (182 feet) at the center, the Curtain remained clear of the slopes and the Valley bottom. A 3 meter (10 foot) skirt attached to the lower part of the Curtain visually completed the area between the thimbles and the ground.

An outer cocoon enclosed the fully fitted Valley Curtain, for protection during transit and at the time of its raising into position and securing to the 11 cable clamps connections at the 4 main upper cables. The cables spanned 417 meters (1,368 feet), weighed 49,895 kilograms (110,000 pounds), and were anchored to 720 metric tonnes (792 short tons) of concrete foundations. An inner cocoon, integral to the Valley Curtain, provided added insurance. The bottom of the Curtain was laced to a 7.6 centimeter (3 inch) diameter dacron rope from which the control and tie-down lines ran to the 27 anchors. The Valley Curtain, project took 28 months to complete.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's temporary work of art was financed by the Valley Curtain Corporation (Jeanne-Claude Christo-Javacheff, President) through the sale of the studies, preparatory drawings and collages, scale models, early works, and original lithographs.