In Fall/Winter 2024, a selection of miniature coral Pod Worlds from the Crochet Coral Reef project is featured in Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at ArtCenter College of Design. This exhibition is part the Getty’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide.
Exhibition Curatorial Statement
“We live in the age of Big Data: extremely large data sets collected from multiple sources by scientists, businesses, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and others. Data visualization—the practice of representing data—is one of the primary tools used to make these massive amounts of data understandable, transforming them into knowledge. Within the sciences, data visualization conveys information in a compelling manner; in art, it transforms information into a canvas for creative expression. Over the past 20 years, artists and designers have incorporated data visualization into their work, both as a way of critiquing it and as a new form of storytelling. Seeing the Unseeable explores how art, science, and design have become integrated in the work of both scientists and contemporary artists.”
Exhibition Curators: Julie Joyce, Stephen Nowlin, Christina Valentine
Artists in the Exhibition:
Refik Anadol, Laurie Frick, Hyojung Seo, George Legrady, Rafael Lozano Hemmer, Giorgia Lupi and Ehren Shorday, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Sarah Morris; Data to Discovery: Santiago Lombeyda and Hillary Mushkin; Mimi Ọnụọha; Semiconductor: Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt; Linnéa Gabriella Spransy; Mika Tajima; Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg; Peggy Weil; Christine Wertheim, Margaret Wertheim and the Institute For Figuring.
Accompanying the exhibition Seeing the Unseeable, is a catalog, including an essay by Margaret Wertheim titled “Making and Knowing: The Vernacular Science of the Crochet Coral Reef,” in which she echoes science historian Pamela Smith’s assertion that processes of artisanal making can constitute a kind of “vernacular science.”
“Histories of science and art are not simply histories of styles, but [also] histories of the making and using of objects to understand the world.”
–Pamela H. Smith, Ways of Making and Knowing (2014)
Essay Extract:
After learning the basic hyperbolic crochet technique, every crafter is free to inject their own deviations: to add to the fiber code, or change it here and there, mimicking the DNA deviations of organic evolution. We too queer the code. “Iterate, deviate, innovate” has been the motto of our project. What is it you can imagine that no one else has done before? Each maker is free to invent new shoots on the crochet “tree of life,” new wooly “organisms” whose multiplicity imitates the diversity of living beings. By emulating the accreted variation of earthly organisms, our crochet reef community has accreted a library of floofy formations and brought into being an ever-evolving taxonomy of crochet coral “species.” Working with codes played out through fibers, we reefers together craft an imitation of life—a visionary yarn-based ecology and true material imaginary.
–Margaret Wertheim (Seeing the Unseeable, catalog, 2024)
In a “PST Preview” in the Los Angeles Times (Aug 29, 2024) Christopher Knight writes movingly about the Crochet Coral Reef:
“…opportunities were missed. Take the Institute for Figuring, a remarkable, 21-year-old project based in L.A. and led by sisters Margaret Wertheim, a science writer, and Christine Wertheim, a poet, who are “dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and engineering.” The dazzling centerpiece is the “Crochet Coral Reef,” an ever-expanding sculpture inspired by the decimation of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. (The sisters were born in Brisbane.)
The project is a global community art initiative, produced mostly by thousands of women who crochet colorful, breathtakingly beautiful reef-like forms according to principles of hyperbolic geometry. “Crocheting is an algorithmic process that can be used to build complex shapes very easily,” Margaret Wertheim once explained to The Times. “It’s like using pixels, only in 3-D.”
Bits and pieces of the amazing reef have been shown locally over the years, including at Track 16 Gallery and ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, where a modest sample will be part of a PST group show, “Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art.” … But you’d have to travel, most recently to Austria’s Schlossmuseum Linz or the Gustav-Lübcke-Museum in Hamm, Germany, to get a substantive overview of the enormous and exceptional work of art. A more ideal moment for organizing a major L.A. museum show to give the reef its public and scholarly due is hard to imagine.”
Exhibition Resources:
PST ART: Art and Science Collide – Getty PST exhibition webpage
ArtCenter College of Design – ArtCenter exhibition webpage
Press:
Los Angeles Times – “PST Preview” by Christopher Knight
