Their monumental work wrapping a mile of Australian coastline in fabric officially opened, one of the earliest and largest landscape-scale art interventions ever attempted.
On October 21, 1969, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet" officially opened to the public at Little Bay, near Sydney, Australia. The project involved wrapping approximately 1.5 miles of coastline — cliffs, rocks, and beach — in over one million square feet of synthetic fabric, secured by 36 miles of rope, employing hundreds of workers including students and local laborers.
This was one of the very first works of monumental land art on this scale anywhere in the world, predating much of the American land art movement's most famous works. It demonstrated Jeanne-Claude's growing role as full creative and logistical partner: she coordinated permissions, financing (the works were always self-funded through the sale of preparatory drawings and collages, never through sponsorship or grants), and the massive workforce needed to execute the piece.
The work was groundbreaking not only in scale but in its philosophy: temporary, ephemeral, and dependent on collaboration between artists, engineers, and the public. It challenged prevailing notions of what art could be and where it could exist, moving sculpture out of the gallery and into the raw natural landscape. "Wrapped Coast" remains a touchstone of the environmental and land art movements, cited in art history as a pivotal demonstration of ambition, scale, and the redefinition of the artist's role as an orchestrator of vast collective enterprises.