Running Fence, Project for Sonoma County and Marin County, State of California

Born Christo Javacheff in Bulgaria in 1935, Christo began making small wrapped objects in Paris in 1958. His partnership with his wife, French-born artist Jeanne- Claude (born Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon), began the same year and led to the first of their large temporary installations, Dockside Packages, on view at the Cologne harbor for two weeks in 1961. The couple made New York their permanent home in 1964 and began creating visionary environmental projects on a huge public scale in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

The AMAM's large two-part drawing was made in conjunction with Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Running Fence (1972-76), in which a white fabric curtain eighteen feet high ran for an amazing twenty-four-and- a-half miles from the northern California town of Cotati at Highway 101 to the Pacific Ocean at Bodega Bay. Completed on September 10, 1976, the temporary project was paid for through the sale of a variety of preparatory drawings like this one, collages, scale models, and lithographs.

Photographs of Running Fence and the drawings connected with it are poetic testaments to the artists' creative use of topography and their engagement with the sheer scale of the physical environment to create a "ribbon of light" through some of Northern California's most picturesque landscapes. Passages of pastel and charcoal in the AMAM drawing re-create the lyrical movement of the fence as it makes its way to the sea. Freehand drawing is combined with technical information and, at the upper left, a commercially printed topographical map showing the path of the section of fence represented in the Oberlin drawing- making this sheet both an artistic statement and an historical document. The drawing's large scale references the monumental size of the huge "drawing" on the landscape created by the artists, using two hundred thousand square meters of heavy woven white nylon fabric strung from a steel cable and 2,050 steel poles.

The AMAM drawing also recalls the time-consuming yet collaborative nature inherent in these inspiring projects: forty-two months of meetings and conversations with ranchers, government officials, and many others resulted in, as described by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, "a four- hundred-and-fifty- page Environmental Impact Report and the temporary use of hills, the sky and the Ocean." Designed to be experienced by following forty miles of public roads in Sonoma and Marin counties, Running Fence was disassembled fourteen days after it was completed and the materials given to the ranchers.

The museum acquired the drawing in 1977, when Ruth Coates Roush (OC 1932) made a surprise gift in honor of her close friend Ellen Johnson, on the occasion of her retirement.