How Ellen Reid conjured public parks and “endless music” on Big Majestic
thefader.comThe Gates began to take root in the frost-bitten New York City ground in mid-February, 2004. Over the next year, 600 workers installed of 7,503 bright orange steel structures, with saffron-colored fabric panels rolled up and affixed to the crossbars, across 23 miles of Central Park walkways.
On February 13, 2005, workers unfurled the 1,000,000 square feet of cloth, one piece at a time. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artists behind the project, had completely transformed Central Park.
The composer and sound artist Ellen Reid was one of the millions of people who saw it in person. “I remember the day that I went to it to experience it,” she says now on a call from her studio in New York. “It had snowed, and so there was the white against the orange of the installation.
It was just beautiful. The scale of it felt inspiring to me." She still has a piece of the fabric that one of her friends, who’d worked as a volunteer on the project, handed her later that month after The Gates was disassembled and Central Park returned to normal.
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