I was so sad to hear of the great land artist, Christo’s passing yesterday. In the midst of all this turmoil –– mass deaths, senseless murders, riots, financial fragility –– Christo and Jean Claude’s Pont Neuf swathed in 440,000 square feet of golden fabric felt like a beacon of hope. Art has always played an integral role in our society. Art educates and punctuates. Art uplifts and inspires. Art helps us connect with one another. Art helps us connect with our inner most selves. Art distracts us from reality, and forces us to look straight at it. When Christo first arrived in Paris in 1958, he began his career by wrapping small, empty cans of paint. He then made his way on to barrels. Can you imagine people’s responses to his early wrapping projects, and what those same individuals had to say when Christo and Jean Claude (his life/work partner of 60-years) proposed the idea of wrapping one of the sculptures in the garden of the Villa Borghese in Rome? Wrapping Pont Neuf in Paris took nine years of negotiations and wrapping the Reichstag took around 25 years. It seems that Jeanne-Claude was the negotiator. It requires tenacity, audacity, courage, humility and great conviction to push through the naysayers, and release your work into the wild. It always struck me that Christo –– ever the egalitarian –– never allotted specific meaning to his grand scale wrapping projects. “Every interpretation of the project is legitimate, even the most critical and the most positive,” he once said. “This is why I enjoy these projects. They have open dimensions that absorb everything.” I choose to see hope. I choose to see possibility. Christo’s last project, the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe was slated to go on view this September, but has been pushed back a year, to 2021. In a 1958 letter Christo wrote, “beauty, science and art will always triumph.”