Continuing through November 8, 2026

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, “Running Fence at 50 Years,” commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the artists’ monumental 1976 intervention in the Sonoma and Marin County landscape. It documents a moment when individual artists began making their own cultural structures rather than waiting for established institutions to give them permission.

“Running Fence” reverses that proposition. It is installed in the Museum’s art building, but it is also fundamentally an exhibition of history. There is little of the fence itself to display, because the artwork was installed for only two weeks in September, 1976. Instead, the exhibition reconstructs the four-year political, social and cultural drama leading up to its installation. The exhibition evidences “Running Fence” through photographs, films, maps, documents and other ephemera, including the vests and helmets worn by volunteers who assembled the fence. Most affecting is a bulletin board where visitors have added their own recollections. Former volunteers, students who participated in the construction and people who simply remember seeing the fence contribute personal histories, transforming the exhibition into act of collective remembering.

This is crucial to understanding what made “Running Fence” such a unique work of art. The fence itself was eighteen feet high and 24½ miles long, extending from near Highway 101 and across the properties of 59 ranchers. It finally dropped into the Pacific near Bodega Bay. The physical spectacle was breathtaking. Enormous quantities of white nylon fabric, steel cable and thousands of steel poles went into its construction. The exhibition makes clear that the preparation for the artwork had been underway since 1972. The four-year process involved ranchers, engineers, construction workers, lawyers, environmentalists, planning commissioners, county supervisors, state agencies, artists and an increasingly fascinated public. There were numerous public hearings, court battles and an extensive environmental impact study. All phases of this process are documented in the exhibition.

That extended gestation is what separated “Running Fence” from other examples of earthworks. Christo and Jeanne-Claude were not simply looking for a place to install a giant object. They had to persuade people to let them cross their property, and that meant entering a community whose values were very different from those of the international art world. They spent months visiting ranchers and explaining the project. Eventually, many of the very people we might expect to resist an avant-garde art project became its most passionate supporters.

Lester Bruhn, a longtime coastal rancher, offered the bluntest possible explanation for his support: “I don’t know anything about art, but I like these folks.” Another sentiment attributed to the ranchers was equally practical. If Christo was going to spend a million dollars in the area, “We’d be darn fools if we don’t take it.” The ranchers were not required to become art theorists. They were asked to trust two strangers who had arrived with an extraordinary proposition. That trust became one of the project’s principal materials.

The strongest opposition did not come from the ranchers. Ironically it came from some of the local artists and environmental activists. Mary Fuller McChesney, a Sonoma County sculptor and writer, famously dismissed the project in a 1975 letter to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat as “a money-making proposition, a deal, not art.” Her husband, painter and teacher Robert McChesney, was also a prominent critic. The Committee to Stop the Running Fence, which included local artists and environmentalists, pursued appeals and legal challenges. The opposition went to the heart of a fundamental question: Who gets to define art, and who gets to determine when an artist has the right to intervene in a community?

The controversy became especially intense because Christo refused to accept the conventional boundary separating the physical artwork from its presentation. At one contentious hearing, he effectively told his opponents that they were already part of the work: whether they supported the fence or opposed it, their participation in the process was integral to the project. Contemporary accounts record how infuriating this idea was to opponents. They wanted to reject the work from the outside, but Christo’s conception made their rejection part of its internal structure. Christo later came to regard much of the artistic opposition as personal, and he later wondered whether he might have avoided some of it had he initially approached the local artists as assiduously as he had approached the ranchers.

This is where “Running Fence” becomes more than an impressive feat of engineering or example of land art. Christo was expanding the definition of the artwork to include negotiation, bureaucracy, disagreement, persuasion, labor and community. The art was not merely the white fabric billowing across the hills; it was the social machinery required to make the fabric appear there in the first place. What would be theorized by Nicolas Bourriaud twenty years later as Relational Aesthetics was already implicit in Christo’s insistence that the relationships surrounding the object were themselves part of the work.

The project was financed through the sale of Christo’s preparatory drawings, collages, models and other works. He and Jeanne-Claude accepted no corporate sponsorship. The project cost more than $2 million at the time, a staggering sum for an artwork that would exist for only two weeks. That apparent contradiction — an enormously expensive artwork whose defining characteristic was its eventual, rapid disappearance — was another source of its conceptual power.

It also helps explain why “Running Fence” can be placed in conversation with Sonoma County punk. Christo and Jeanne-Claude were internationally established artists, not impoverished teenagers putting on shows in abandoned spaces. Their operation involved lawyers, engineers, professional construction crews and an enormous financial apparatus. Yet, at the level of artistic philosophy, there is a striking parallel. Both projects depended upon self-organization, individual initiative and collective participation rather than institutional permission.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude did not ask a museum to commission “Running Fence.” They conceived it, financed it, negotiated it and organized its realization themselves. More importantly, they built a temporary community around it. The project crossed property lines, political jurisdictions, class distinctions and cultural expectations. In short, they challenged the art world status quo.

After fourteen days, the fabric came down. The materials were given to the ranchers, some of whom reportedly used the nylon for years to cover manure piles and other practical purposes. The landscape returned to its previous condition. The physical evidence disappeared, leaving photographs, films, drawings, artifacts and memories. “Running Fence at 50 Years” is therefore faced with an inherent paradox: how do you exhibit an artwork whose most important characteristic is that it no longer exists? The answer is to exhibit the evidence of the community that made it possible.

That is why the handwritten recollections from Museum visitors may ultimately be more important than any single historical photograph. They demonstrate that the project did not end when the fence was dismantled. Rose C. writes: “‘Running Fence’ is a reminder to what a visionary in collaboration with a community can achieve together. Not for financial gain, political theater or anything but to inspire the perspective of humans of all varying backgrounds. A fence of which its purpose was not to divide and exclude, but to bring together, in an appreciation of human effort and collaboration that to this day still sparks open and welcome opinions and discussion.” The artwork survives not as an object but as accumulated memory.

Albert Maysles, who filmed the project, understood the paradox. A fence ordinarily divides people, he observed, while this particular fence brought people together to look, argue and think about art. That may be the most useful way to understand this fiftieth anniversary exhibition. Christo and Jeanne-Claude did not merely put a fence across Sonoma and Marin counties. They turned the very idea of a fence against itself.

Fences divide. “Running Fence” connected. Like the punk culture documented at the Museum’s concurrent exhibition, “Disturbing the Peace: Sonoma County’s Early Punk Underground,” its deepest legacy may lie less in the thing that was produced than in the people who discovered that something previously thought impossible could be best achieved with individual initiative and collective action. The fence disappeared in 1976. Fifty years later, the arguments, memories and possibilities it generated still echo across the Sonoma County landscape.