Arts & Culture

Decades after Sonoma ‘Running Fence,’ Christo still making art — and waves

New documentary examines public battles over revolutionary installation.

Bureaucracy has once again issued a daunting challenge to the art of Christo, this time “Over the River,” his proposed temporary installation of shimmering fabric across the Arkansas River in Colorado. The battle, waged this summer, mirrors one that arose just across the Golden Gate Bridge in the early 1970s, when Christo and his French wife/collaborator, Jeanne-Claude, fought government and naysayers to create “Running Fence.”

Arts & Culture

Outtakes from the filming of ‘The Running Fence Revisited’

In September 2009, artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude returned to Northern California for the 33-year anniversary of their “Running Fence” (1976) installation and to film “The Running Fence Revisited” (2010), directed by Wolfram Hissen and sponsored by the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.

During the filming, author Erin Van Rheenen did double duty as both writer and girl Friday for the crew. Between takes she interviewed Jeanne-Claude and Christo — at the Petaluma Denny’s, at a reunion picnic and in the car as they traced the route of where the fence had run. She may have been the last to interview Jeanne-Claude, who died suddenly on Nov. 18, 2009, at the age of 74.

The scenes described in the story first appeared in a slightly different form as the program for the documentary’s West Coast premiere back in June.