Sonoma County ranchers and their offspring will rub shoulders with the art world Thursday in Washington D.C. when the Smithsonian American Art Museum opens an exhibit on the "Running Fence," an epic work from 1976.
The Fence, the creation of Christo Javacheff and wife Jeanne-Claude, was a 24-mile curtain that ran from Highway 101 near Cotati to the Pacific Ocean. Its 18-foot-tall sheets of white fabric stayed up for only two weeks, but the exhibit and a related film and book testify to the Fence's impact.
"The Running Fence was a very important moment in American art," said George Gurney, the museum's deputy chief curator.
The project took 42 months from conception to completion. The Fence was immense, with 240,000 square yards of white nylon, 2,050 poles and 90 miles of steel cable. Its path included parts of Sonoma and Marin counties.
Completing the work required not only the willingness of 59 landowners to host the Fence, but also the artists' use of the democratic process to win needed government approvals.
"In the long run, it is about the freedom of expression," Gurney said. "Because you're in a free country, you can do that."
The museum, located about eight blocks from the White House, will host a gala for about 650 guests Thursday night, followed by a formal opening Friday.
Those on hand Thursday will include Joe Pozzi, a Bodega sheep and cattle rancher who was a teenager when Christo and Jean-Claude visited his family for permission to put the Fence across his land.
"It was just amazing to think that Christo was able to bring together this many landowners, from Cotati to the Pacific," Pozzi said.
For him, the fence was proof that "you put your mind to something, you can make it happen."
Also attending will be Mary Ann Bruhn, whose parents, Lester and Amelia Bruhn, gave Christo permission to put up the fence on their sheep ranch near Valley Ford.
Her father, Bruhn recalled, "took a great liking to Christo and Jeanne-Claude" and encouraged other ranchers to support the artwork.
Bruhn remembers the sublime effects on the fence at sunrise or when the wind caught the fabric.
"It was beautiful," she said. "It was something you will never see again."
The Smithsonian exhibit, which runs through Sept. 26, includes a majority of the 350 drawings, collages, photos and documents the museum acquired from the artists in 2008. On display will be 46 of Christo's preparatory drawings, more than 240 photos, eight large-scale drawings and a 58-foot-long scale model.
After Running Fence, Christo and Jean-Claude went on to wrap Berlin's Reichstag in fabric in 1995 and place fabric pieces for "The Gates" in New York's Central Park in 2005.
The Smithsonian exhibit and a commissioned film are dedicated to the memory of Jeanne-Claude, who died in November.
Christo is slated to speak Friday night after the premiere of the film, "The Running Fence Revisited," by Wolfram Hissen, which was filmed in Sonoma County last summer. The exhibit will feature regular showings of that film, as well as the 1978 film "Running Fence" by Albert and David Maysles, with Charlotte Zerwin.
Santa Rosa attorney Ed Anderson, who represented Christo before county and state commissions, will attend Thursday's gala.
Anderson contributed a chapter to the museum's new book that accompanies the exhibit. In it he called the Running Fence "the most democratic art project in the nation's history" and said it defied assumptions on the limits and uses of art.
Before he left for Washington, Anderson recalled that, on first hearing of the project, most people "thought it was kind of crazy." But once it went up, he said, "people really enjoyed it."
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