World-renowned environmental artist Christo will speak in Stowe next month, marking the first anniversary of the launch of the Vermont Town Hall speaker series.
Born Christo Javacheff in Bulgaria in 1935, the artist has become known for large-scale and temporary outdoor works he completed in collaboration with his artistic partner and wife Jeanne-Claude.
Based in New York City, Christo and Jeanne-Claude exhibited installations in public spaces around the world. The Pont-Neuf Wrapped, 1975-1985, involved covering the 17th century Parisian bridge with 450,000 square feet of sandstone-colored fabric. A later installation, The Umbrellas, involved simultaneous temporary exhibits of 3,100 umbrellas in California and Japan and took 1,880 workers to set up.
Using monuments or landscapes as a canvas, Christo’s work disrupts familiar public spaces, and, despite taking decades to realize, often last for just a few weeks.
In a more recent exhibit, the artists installed gates draped with saffron-colored nylon fabric along 23 miles of pathways in Central Park in New York City in 2005.
Jeanne-Claude passed away in 2009, but Christo continues to work on developing Over the River, a project that, when realized, will involve installing canopy above 5.9 miles of the Arkansas River in Colorado.
The Vermont Town Hall series started in 2014 at the Spruce Peak Performing Arts Center to foster conversation with well-established figures in the arts, politics, and business. Previous speakers include Amy Goodman, Bill McKibben and Tom Chappell.
Christo’s talk will begin at 7pm on Thursday, February 5 at the Spruce Peak Performing Arts Center. Tickets and more information are available at www.SprucePeakArts.org
