Jeanne-Claude, part of art duo who covered the globe

NEW YORK - Artist Jeanne-Claude, 74, who created the Central Park installation The Gates and other large-scale "wrapping" projects worldwide with her husband, Christo, has died.

She died Wednesday at a New York hospital from complications of a brain aneurysm, her family said in an e-mail statement.

In 2005, The Gates festooned 23 miles of Central Park's footpaths with thousands of saffron drapes hung from specially designed frames. More than five million people saw it, and it was credited with injecting $254 million into the local economy.

Christo - the more famous of the duo - was saddened, the family statement said, but remained "committed to honor the promise they made to each other many years ago: that the art of Christo and Jeanne-Claude would continue." That includes completing two current installations, Over the River, Project for the Arkansas River, State of Colorado, and The Mastaba, in the United Arab Emirates.

The Colorado project involves spanning miles of the river with fabric. They chose the location near Canon City because of its rapids and access to footpaths and roads. It is expected to be realized by mid-2013, at the earliest, said the statement.

Their other projects include wrapping the Reichstag parliament building in Germany, the Kunsthalle art exhibition hall in Bern, Switzerland, a Roman wall in Italy, and the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris. A 1991 project involved thousands of bright yellow and blue umbrellas positioned across miles of valleys in Japan and California.

Their projects used huge amounts of manpower - the umbrellas employed 1,880 - and miles of fabric and other materials, all of which was recycled after each project.

The couple said they never accepted sponsorship and financed all their installations through the projects, including the sale of preparatory drawings, collages, scale models, and original lithographs.

The Mastaba (Arabic for bench) envisions a pyramidal structure of 410,000 brightly colored oil barrels stacked horizontally and rising 492 feet high and 984 feet wide.

"Hundreds of bright colors, as enchanting as Islamic mosaics, will give a constantly changing visual experience" varying with time of day and quality of light, the artists' Web site says.

The two artists met in Paris in 1958 and collaborated for 51 years on temporary public arts projects. They lived in Manhattan for 45 years.

Jeanne-Claude, who sported signature orange-dyed hair, once said that the couple, like parents who wouldn't favor one child over another, felt that "each project is a child of ours." But she added that their favorite project was "the next one."

Plans for a memorial will be announced at a later date, but the family said it would donate her body to science, as was her wish.

See more on the artist's life and works via www.christojeanneclaude.net/index.shtml EndText