64 Minutes With Installation Artist Christo

The installation artist returns to the scene of his Miami “crime.”

- Jarrett Earnest

Nothing, nothing, nothing,” Christo exclaims, gesturing first toward the boats clustered in Pelican Harbor and then to the high-rises crowding the shoreline. “There was nothing existing then.” It’s a brilliant December morning, and we’re cruising across Miami’s Biscayne Bay toward the several low islets he and his collaborator-wife, Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009, made famous 35 years ago as the Surrounded Islands. “As Jeanne-Claude would always say, ‘We return to the scene of the crime!’ ” Christo announces with delight. “That’s always part of it we like to see. The places change so much—that’s reality.”

As our boat approaches the small sandy mass now dubbed Pelican Island but back then simply called No. 8, he points to the aluminum dock and wooden roofs peeking out of the mangrove canopy: “There was nothing on there, either. You couldn’t even walk, it was so dense.”

Like “happy little accidents” populating Bob Ross’s landscapes, the islands are remnants of a 1920s dredging project. Seeds of the invasive Australian pine had found their way onto manmade land and a haphazard ecosystem was formed. Christo and Jeanne-Claude noticed them while crossing the Venetian Causeway (which connects the barrier island of Miami Beach to Miami proper) when they visited the area in 1980. Almost immediately, they had an idea: to wreathe 11 of them in 6.5 million square feet of tropical-pink woven polypropylene, creating a wide, matlike margin of gently pulsing plastic that would remain for two weeks before being removed. To pull off their installation, Christo and Jean-Claude would have to engage the federal, state, and county bureaucratic machinery and hire engineers, scientists, and lawyers. They were nothing if not persistent. (Their 2005 artwork The Gates, in Central Park, was 26 years in the making.)