Christo and Jeanne-Claude are best known for producing enormous “packaging projects”: they wrap parks, buildings and entire outdoor landscapes with various cloth materials. Christo and Jeanne-Claude have collaborated for over 40 years on these projects. They raise the huge amounts of money required to execute their monumental works by selling the preparatory drawings for their projects. Jeanne-Claude and Christo believe that people should have intense and memorable experiences of art outside the institution of the museum.
Typically, the artists create temporary wrappings—generally lasting for several weeks—on a vast scale. Borrowing land, structures, and spaces used and built by public funds, Christo momentarily intervenes in the local daily rhythms of the people who use the space, in order to create “gentle disturbances”: intended to refocus the audience’s impressions. Such disturbances force each local participant/viewer to examine the way that social interaction becomes entrenched in routine and is consequently deadened.