Harvard Law School Honors ‘The Gates’ Artists

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, two world-famous artists who have stirred controversy over the years with their large-scale projects, received a Harvard Law School award yesterday in recognition of their skill in negotiating permission for their works.

The Great Negotiator Award is given annually by the Law School’s Program on Negotiation and has historically been awarded to figures in business and international diplomacy. Christo and Jeanne-Claude—a married couple recently known for their 2005 project “The Gates” in Central Park, which featured over 7,500 bright orange structures erected along the park’s pathways—are the first artists to receive the award, given to them in a ceremony at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston.

“What we look for in a great negotiator is someone who has demonstrated the capacity to overcome barriers and create solutions in a number of settings,” said Robert H. Mnookin ’64, Law School professor and chair of the Program on Negotiation. “We thought that Christo and Jeanne-Claude had done this a number of times.”

The artists have enjoyed widespread popularity and even support from New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg when working on “The Gates.” But not all communities initially appreciated their proposals, which often asked for permission to create—and then dismantle—large structures on private property.

“Running Fence,” one of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s earlier projects, featured an 18-foot-high curtained fence running 24 miles through northern California. To obtain permission for the project, the artists negotiated contracts with 59 cattle ranchers.

“I remember I made a few boo-boos the first few days,” Jeanne-Claude said in a clip from a documentary that was shown at the event. “I would knock on the door at a reasonable time, like 7:30 or 8 p.m., and I would wake up the whole house.”

But after overcoming early misunderstandings, she said the rancher community turned into one of her most valued allies.

“Ranchers are very pragmatic people, they are hard workers, and they understood we are hard workers,” she said. “The government would never have given us a chance, except that the ranchers said, ‘I have the right to have that fence on my land.’”

Christo and Jeanne-Claude encountered opposition in many of their projects, including “The Gates,” which they first proposed in 1979 but did not come to fruition for over two decades.

“The process [of obtaining permission] sometimes makes the work much more important,” said Christo, referring to the media attention and iconic identity that the projects gained from each prolonged effort to obtain approval.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are currently working on a project entitled “Over The River”—a six-mile-long stretch of fabric panels suspended over the Arkansas River. It is expected to be completed in the summer of 2012, pending the success of their proven negotiation methods.

—Staff writer Athena Y. Jiang can be reached at ajiang@fas.harvard.edu.