The Baden Baden Satellite Reef – the Sistine Chapel of crochet reefs – is showing in an extraordinary exhibition at the International Maritime Museum in Hamburg. Titled Corals: The Play of Colors in Art and Science, the exhibition presents the biggest, most complex crochet reef ever made in a dramatic grotto-like setting within the the world’s largest maritime museum. The result is a stunning, theatrical spectacle which Crochet Coral Reef co-creators Christine Wertheim and Margaret Wertheim describe as “the epitome of our 20-year-long coralline dream and the realization of our wildest artistic imaginings for the project.”
Originally created at Museum Frieder Burda in 2022, the Baden Baden Satellite Reef comprises nearly 40,000 coral pieces made by 4,000 crafters from across Germany and beyond. All participants are acknowledged in the gallery in a panoramic artwork known as “The Wall of Names” listing every one of these makers.
The Maritime Museum’s Corals exhibition brings together the art of the Crochet Coral Reef with artifacts from the IMM’s own collection plus natural history and artisanal treasures from the Museum der Natur Hamburg and the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity, putting art, science and craftsmanship into dialog.
Exhibition curated by Patrick Riviere
About the Baden Baden Satellite Reef
In 2021/2022, Margaret and Christine Wertheim collaborated with Museum Frieder Burda in Baden Baden (Germany), to create a vast citizen-made Satellite Reef as the community component of a museum-wide Crochet Reef retrospective exhibition “Value and Transformation of Corals.”
The resulting Baden Baden Satellite Reef comprises over 40,000 coral pieces by thousands of contributors from across the German speaking world. At once a monumental work of feminine fiber art and a mathematically generated synthetic ecology, this is by far the largest community reef to date.
For the exhibition Margaret and Christine worked with a dedicated team of local crafters who helped curate this massive wooly outpouring into a collection of three-dimensional coral islands and a series of large-scale ‘coral paintings’. The local curatorial team consists of Kathrin Dorfner, Martina Schulz, Christina Humpert, Charlotte Reiter, Susan Reiss and Silke Habich – with assistance from the entire team of Museum Frieder Burda’s art workshop and installation crew led by master carpenter Arnd Merkle, plus twenty local seamstresses.
“Generated by thousands of hands and as many imaginations, these works challenge normative ideas about the artist as singular genius and add a new dimension to the field of collaborative fiber-craft in the tradition of community-centered creations such as the Gees Bend’s quilts.”
About the Crochet Coral Reef project
An immense gentle testimony to the power of community-centered art-making, the Baden Baden Satellite Reef is the culmination of two-decades of research and development at the nexus of art-and-science by Christine Wertheim and Margaret Wertheim with their Crochet Coral Reef project.
Combining handicraft, mathematics and marine biology, the Crochet Coral Reef is now the worlds largest science and art endeavor, with over 30,000 participants worldwide. Begun in 2005 – and running continuously for 20 years – the Crochet Reef was one of the first art projects to address the issue of climate change, and was inspired by the decimation of the Great Barrier Reef due to global warming in Queensland, Australia, where the Wertheims grew up. Additionally, the project follows in the tradition of collaborative feminist art practice pioneered by artists such as Judy Chicago and Mierle Lederman Ukeles.
About the International Maritime Museum
“9 floors – 3 millennia of maritime history”
At a historic site in the heart of the Hanseatic City of Hamburg, the sea comes to life across nine floors at the International Maritime Museum. Here, three millennia of maritime history are celebrated: “the great freedom of the water, the development of shipping, and the emergence of global trade routes.” On display are more than 55,000 ship models, along with paintings, globes, historical nautical charts, unique marine atlases, and souvenir ocean-themed treasures from around the world, including hand-painted compasses, sextants, porcelain from the first cruise ships, and “legendary bone ships.”
IMM website
