Surrounded Islands: how Christo and Jeanne-Claude turned Biscayne Bay pink in 1983

Before there was an art fair on Miami Beach, there was a pink bay. For about two weeks in May 1983, eleven small islands between North Miami and the Venetian Causeway floated in skirts of bright pink fabric, and Miami, a city then better known to the world for refugees and riots, found itself on the front pages for a work of art. If you want to understand why the art world first looked south, start here, not at the convention center.

The work was Surrounded Islands, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the Bulgarian-born artist and his Moroccan-born wife, already known for vast, temporary works in fabric (PBS NewsHour). It took them two and a half years to win permission and a few days to install, and it was gone before the month was out. What is left is the paperwork, the photographs, the film and a museum show in Fort Lauderdale.

The facts below come from the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, the day-by-day timeline PAMM published for its 2018 exhibition, contemporary reports in The New York Times and ARTnews, and the museum now holding the archive, checked on October 24, 2026. Where the sources disagree, we say so.

An invitation, and a drive over the causeways

The invitation came from Jan van der Marck, director of Miami's Center for the Fine Arts, the institution that would become the Miami Art Museum and then PAMM. In October 1980 he asked his friends to make something for the New World Festival of the Arts, planned for June 1982. The festival offered $200,000 toward the project; Christo turned it down, as he turned down every offer of outside money (The New York Times).

At the end of December 1980 the couple came to look. Beth Dunlop, the Miami Herald's architecture critic, drove them around the city, and crossing the causeways they noticed the small islands strung along the bay: spoil islands, made of the sand and rock dredged up when the Intracoastal Waterway was cut in the 1920s, uninhabited and littered (PAMM). They first considered islands farther south, then chose the northern chain because it lay closer to the apartment towers, where more people would see it. Christo compared the bay to Central Park: a man-made park in the middle of a city, used every day, only made of water. The project was announced at a Miami press conference in April 1981.

The paper war

The idea was simple; permission was not. Over the next 18 months the artists and their team applied to the Governor and Cabinet of Florida, the Dade County Commission, the state Department of Environmental Regulation, the City of Miami, the City of North Miami, the Village of Miami Shores, the county's environmental department and the US Army Corps of Engineers (Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation). By the end, the count was ten permit applications, seven public hearings and about $400,000 of environmental studies (ARTnews).

The team read like a small research institute: two lawyers, a marine biologist who studied the seagrass, two ornithologists who counted the wading birds, a specialist in marine mammals, a marine engineer, four consulting engineers and a builder. The studies were thorough to the point of comedy. In September 1982, at the Army Corps' request, the manatee tank at SeaWorld in Orlando was covered in pink fabric so that a biologist could watch how the animals reacted (PAMM).

The approvals came one by one. In June 1982 the Governor and Cabinet agreed to rent the artists the submerged land around the eleven islands for two weeks, for $12,827.08. In July a stormy county hearing ended in an 8–1 vote in favour, on condition that the artists give the county $100,000 in artworks, and the City of Miami approved unanimously for $50,000 in artworks more. The state environmental permit arrived in August, printed on pink paper, and the Army Corps issued the final permit in October. The Army Corps would not allow the work during hurricane season, so the festival date had long since gone, and the project was set for the spring of 1983.

There was one more fight. In February 1983 Jack Kassewitz Jr., a local environmentalist with a group called the National Wildlife Rescue Team, sued in federal court to stop the project, arguing that it threatened fish, birds and seagrass; he took to calling himself the Count of Anti-Christo. In March the case was settled before Judge James Lawrence King: Kassewitz won the right to monitor the work, and a panel of scientists would watch the bay for two years after it came down. A later attempt to stop the artists at one island was refused in April (PAMM). Christo later said a federal judge had spent four days discussing birds and flowers.

Making it: a Hialeah warehouse, 610 anchors and 40 tons of rubbish

The fabric was a woven pink polypropylene, made in Germany: 6.5 million square feet in all. From December 1982, 45 workers in a rented warehouse in Hialeah spent five months cutting and sewing it into 79 patterns, one for each stretch of shoreline, then folding it into long bundles the crews called cocoons (PAMM).

Each piece covered the beach and ran 200 feet out into the bay. Its outer edge was sewn to a floating boom, 12 inches across and octagonal, in the same pink, which made a clean line around each island, like a pencil drawing seen from above. The booms were held by 610 anchors driven into the limestone of the bay floor, and the inland edge by anchors at the foot of the trees (Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation).

First the islands had to be cleaned. In April 1983 crews took off about 40 tons of rubbish: refrigerator doors, tires, kitchen sinks, mattresses and an abandoned boat. Then 430 workers, many of them newly arrived Cuban and Haitian immigrants and local artists, signed on at the Pelican Harbor Yacht Club beside the 79th Street Causeway. They were paid $28 a day, wore pink shirts and worked shifts that sometimes began at 3 a.m., with 120 monitors in inflatable boats watching day and night.

The artists paid for everything. The estimate on the first day was about $3.1 million; ARTnews later put the cost at $3.5 million. The money came from selling Christo's preparatory drawings and collages through the couple's company, run by Jeanne-Claude, which in Florida traded as the Surrounded Islands Corporation, and from a $700,000 bank loan secured on his work (ARTnews).

Blossoming: May 4 to May 19, 1983

The unfurling began on May 4, 1983, a day the crews called blossoming day. Wind and rain stopped the work for hours, and only the smallest, northernmost island was finished. Christo raced from island to island in a speedboat, shouting through a bullhorn, with a swarm of press boats and helicopters behind him (The New York Times). On the second day the fabric at one island seemed to be sinking, and Jeanne-Claude jumped into the bay to haul at it until the tide lifted it again.

By 2 p.m. on May 7 all eleven islands were finished. For about ten days they stayed that way, and on May 17 the crews began taking it all down; by May 19 the bay was blue again. Everything was removed except the bay anchors, which the permit required to be left buried, and the fabric was recycled.

Seen from the causeways and the apartment towers, the islands looked like enormous flowers lying on the water. Christo was happy for people to think of Monet. "This is my Water Lilies," he told ARTnews. The colour was compared to frangipani by some writers and bubble gum by others; he wanted something artificial and, as he put it, Latin rather than Anglo-Saxon. The work demanded to be seen from the air, and the photographs most people know, taken from helicopters by the project's photographer Wolfgang Volz, are still how it is remembered.

How Miami saw it

Miami saw it from wherever it could. Cars stopped on the causeways and their passengers got out to look; boats circled the islands; helicopters sold rides. County tourism officials had expected 20,000 visitors to come for it alone, though no count of how many did survives. The Herald's front page on May 4 called it a pink sunset on the bay.

The art press was divided, as it usually was about Christo. In The New Yorker, Calvin Tomkins found it surpassingly beautiful; Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum, mocked it as pink tutus for an island chain. Television crews asked museum officials whether it was art. A boy told a local news crew it was a waste of money, since it was only up for two weeks, which was, of course, the point.

The timing gave it weight. Miami in 1983 was three years past the Mariel boatlift, which brought about 125,000 Cubans across the Florida Straits, and the McDuffie riots, and the city's reputation abroad was not for culture. For two weeks the world's newspapers ran a different picture of it. Bonnie Clearwater, director of NSU Art Museum, calls the work the opening salvo that made the art world notice Miami. Whether it led, in some line, to Art Basel's arrival 19 years later is a matter of opinion, but no one tells the story of Miami as an art city without it.

After the pink: the film, the shows and the archive

The documentation exhibition, with drawings, collages, photographs, models and pieces of fabric, toured seven European countries and Japan from 1984 to 1991. Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, who filmed many of the couple's projects, made a documentary, Islands, about it.

For the 35th anniversary, PAMM, the museum that grew out of van der Marck's Center for the Fine Arts, showed the documentation in the United States for the first time, from October 4, 2018 to February 18, 2019, and Christo came to speak at the opening (PAMM). Jeanne-Claude had died in 2009; Christo died in May 2020, aged 84.

In September 2024 the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation gave the Surrounded Islands archive to NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale: more than 43 preparatory drawings and collages by Christo, with photographs, photo murals, engineering surveys, environmental studies, permits, correspondence, scale models and sections of the original pink fabric. The Foundation named the museum the work's permanent home (Hyperallergic).

Seeing Surrounded Islands today

The best way to see it now is at NSU, where the documentation exhibition opened on February 23, 2025 and runs through spring 2027 (NSU Art Museum). It fills the second floor: floor-to-ceiling video, some of it shot from under the fabric; a mural-size photograph of the pink islands with the Miami skyline behind; a pool of the original fabric on the floor; the drawings and collages that paid for the work; and the permits, including, if you look, a great deal of correspondence about birds. There is a booth where visitors record their own memories of the work. Give it an hour; if you remember 1983, give it longer.

Visiting NSU Art Museum: hours and the free Thursday

• Address: One East Las Olas Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301.
• Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11 am to 5 pm; Sunday, noon to 5 pm; closed Monday (NSU Art Museum).
• Free first Thursdays: free admission and late hours, 11 am to 7 pm, on the first Thursday of the month, which in fair week is Thursday, December 3.
• When: the show runs through spring 2027; after that, key sections stay on permanent display.

The islands themselves are still there. Cross the 79th Street or Julia Tuttle Causeway and you pass the same chain of spoil islands, restored and replanted by the county since the 1990s, some of them picnic spots for boaters. None of them is marked, and the sources do not say exactly which eleven wore the pink, so look for the low green islands on the bay side and imagine the rest.

For the art that came after, see how Art Basel came to Miami Beach; for the museums to see in fair week, Miami museums during Art Basel.