Christo and Jeanne-Claude will be awarded honorary degrees by Occidental President Jonathan Veitch in recognition of the inspiring body of work they have created over the past 50 years. The 5:30 p.m. ceremony will be held in Thorne Hall on the Occidental campus. A reception will follow.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s installations in urban and rural environments rely on the use of fabric and textiles and combine elements of painting, sculpture, and architecture. The temporary nature of their art – they wrapped the Reichstag in fabric and set up 3,100 blue and yellow umbrellas in Japan and California — mirrors the temporary nature of human existence, the artists say.

“For instance, we have love and tenderness for childhood because we know it will not last. We have love and tenderness for our own life because we know it will not last,” Jeanne-Claude said in a 2002 interview. “That quality of love and tenderness, we wish to donate it, [to] endow our work with it as an additional aesthetic quality.”

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s current project, Over the River, would suspend translucent panels of fabric over almost 6 miles of the Arkansas River in eastern Colorado, visible to rafters as well as motorists on U.S. Highway 50 traveling between Canon City and Salida. Like some of their other projects, the proposed installation has generated controversy, which Christo says is part of the artistic process. “By discussing the work of art they become part of the work of art,” he said in a recent Los Angeles Times interview

Born in Bulgaria as Christo Valdimirov Javacheff, Christo met Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon in Paris in 1958. They became artistic collaborators three years later, and in 1964 moved to New York, where Jeanne-Claude died in November 2009.

Past recipients of Occidental honorary degrees have included Richard Diebenkorn, Ansel Adams, Frank Gehry, Ray Charles, Jackson Browne, Zubin Mehta and Bella Lewitsky.

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