Christo, one half of the experimental artist team Christo and Jeanne-Claude, passed away on May 31, 2020. Christo and Jeanne-Claude created large public installations that played with perceptions of scale–they often wrapped prominent landmarks in fabric, for instance. The couple, who met in Paris in the 1950s, created works that often took years of design and construction and often drew criticism and controversy from their audience.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work created works that appeared in several exhibitions at Penn’s Institute of Contemporary Art, at its various locations on Penn’s campus. In 1968, when the ICA was new and located in Meyerson Hall, it hosted a one-man exhibition of Christo’s work, including two fabric-wrapped trees called Monuments and Projects (Almanac October 1968). 

Nine years later, a sculpture by Christo and Jeanne-Claude appeared in an ICA exhibit called Improbable Furniture (Almanac March 1, 1977). And three years after that, the ICA’s Venice Biennale exhibit featured a drawing of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s exhibit Running Fence, a strip of fabric that they had installed running down part of the west coast in 1976 (Almanac April 24, 1980). 

Christo’s unique brand of wrapping captivated the Penn campus imagination. In 1987, when part of the Furness Library (now the Fisher Fine Arts Building) was wrapped in tarp as part of a renovation project, an Almanac piece asked, “Return of Christo?” (Almanac November 24, 1987).