Christo and Jean-Claude’s Running Fence revisited at Sonoma County Museum talk

As an art student at Sonoma State College 40 years ago, Jan Sofie leaped at the chance to help a pair of exotic artists, one Bulgarian and the other Moroccan, to string a curtain 24.5 miles across the undulating grasslands of western Sonoma and Marin counties.

Ask her about it and watch her face brighten like a full moon.

“It was just stunning,” she said of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence. She’s also frank about the hardships of the construction crew: the weather was torrid that fall of 1976, the coastal wind was brutal and the food and water provided to laborers were unpredictable at best.

“It was a very intense job,” said Sofie, now director of Santa Rosa High School’s acclaimed ArtQuest program. But that week or so of work on the ultimately world-famous temporary art project left her with memories and sensations she’s held dear all these years.

This evening in Santa Rosa, Sofie will sit on a six-person panel that will recall and reflect on the Running Fence.

She may mention that one miserably hot day, she and college friend Trudy Elkins took respite from the sun by lying in the scant shade of one of the Fence’s white fabric panels. Sofie noticed turkey vultures circling and descending “to see if we were alive.”

She said Elkins mentioned to her that vultures will regurgitate onto a potential meal to see if it’s really dead.

End of nap.

Sofie remembers, too, that she’d never seen duct tape when Christo distributed rolls of it for fortifying the hooks that connected the curtain to the cables that linked 2,050 steel poles. One day she noticed something peculiar about Christo’s bell-bottom pants.

“Everybody wore bell-bottoms in those days,” she said. Looking closer at Christo’s, she saw that he’d used duct tape to cinch up the flare pantlegs - a perfect solution to the nettlesome foxtails that everybody had to pluck from their bell-bottoms.

Maybe five minutes later, Sofie’s own billowing pantlegs were duct-taped, too.

Today, Sofie and Elkins and four others who recall the Running Fence will speak about it at the county history museum, inside the former post office on Santa Rosa’s Seventh Street.

The other panelists are Joe Pozzi, son of late rancher Ed Pozzi, who welcomed the artists and their project onto his land; Lucy Kortum, whose late husband, pioneer conservationist Bill Kortum, opposed the fence, and two men who worked on the project’s Environmental Impact Report, Chuck Quibell and Tom Anderson.

A reception begins at 6:30 p.m., with the conversation beginning at 7 p.m. Admission is $10 for museum members, $15 for nonmembers.

The art museum next door to the history museum now is showing an exhibit of the Running Fence, and on Thursday will co-host at the Union Hotel in Occidental a screening of the 2010 documentary, “The Running Fence Revisited.”