TYLER, YX.- The Tyler Museum of Art spotlights the process behind 35 years of massive environmental projects throughout the world with its next major exhibition, Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Tom Golden Collection. Featuring more than 50 collages, photographs, drawings and objects spotlighting the couple’s legendary career, the exhibition opened to the public on Sunday, Oct. 2 and continues through Jan. 8, 2017 at the TMA, 1300 S. Mahon Ave. on the Tyler Junior College main campus.

Organized by the Sonoma County Museum in Santa Rosa, Calif., the exhibition surveys the career of Christo and his late wife Jeanne-Claude through small-scale pieces made between 1962 and 2000 that have functioned both as plans for large-scale outdoor installations and as sale items to fund their major projects. The collection features design sketches for several projects that still are works in progress – notably Over the River, for which Christo plans to suspend almost six miles of luminous fabric panels high above a stretch of the Arkansas River between Salida and Canon City, Colo., within the next few years. TMA will be the first Texas venue in more than a decade to host an exhibition of the couple’s work.

“Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects exist only briefly in the world but are anticipated with suspense for years while being planned,” TMA curator Caleb Bell said, noting the recent effort The Floating Piers, for which Christo made international news by using 100,000 yards of shimmering yellow fabric to transform a lake in northern Italy into an enormous environmental installation. First conceived in 1970, The Floating Piers remained accessible to the public for a mere 16 days in June and July 2016.