Legendary art installation ‘The Gates’ returns (digitally) to Central Park

Thousands of 16-foot-tall orange gates lined Central Park's pathways for 16 days in February 2005. The momentous public art installation known as "The Gates" was stunning in its size and simplicity. For many viewers, it celebrated the park, the city and the persistence of joy — despite the fact that the installation was on display in the depths of winter as New York continued to heal from the 9/11 attacks.

To mark the ephemeral exhibit's 20th anniversary, the Shed at Hudson Yards will host a retrospective on "The Gates" through March 23, with an accompanying digital recreation via augmented reality. Both are free.

The retrospective, which is titled “Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates and Unrealized Projects for New York City,” features scale models of the installation as well as materials. It also displays videos of the pair behind the installation — married couple Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon — fighting with community boards for permission to stage the exhibit. Additionally, there are photographs, drawings and a gallery of similarly ambitious, but unrealized proposals by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

Meanwhile, “The Gates: An Augmented Reality Experience” enables Central Park visitors to better experience what the exhibition looked like 20 years ago. Various QR-code equipped kiosks throughout the park allow app users to scan and see "The Gates" through the lens of their phones. The exhibition and app are supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Michael Bloomberg’s charitable organization, in partnership with the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, the Shed, the Central Park Conservancy and the city's parks department. (Bloomberg was mayor in 2005 and worked to greenlight "The Gates.")

More than 4 million people visited "The Gates." I was among them, and though I was only 10, I have never forgotten wandering beneath all that billowing saffron fabric. There was a distinct feeling of being part of something bigger than myself.

"The Gates" has continued to live on in the memories of New Yorkers who visited and through its enormous influence over public art. Michelle Young, a professor of architecture at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, said that "The Gates" was “the catalyst and the forerunner” of many of today’s immersive public art installations.

“Looking back, people might not grasp how groundbreaking 'The Gates' was, because many of its design elements have been distilled and watered down in the many corporate immersive art installations in New York City,” Young wrote in an email. “But everyone can still learn from a project that was able to bring the city together in a way that few art installations have been able to do since."