During 2023, crafters across Pittsburgh crocheted corals for a Pittsburgh Satellite Reef, now installed in a large-scale aquarium-like vitrine in the Charity Randall Gallery at the Carnegie Museum of Art. 281 citizen-artists contributed to the installation, which has been curated vertically with majestic coral groupings appearing to swim across the vitrine walls above a series of small coral mounds. This visual presentation is part of a new curatorial strategy developed by Crochet Coral Reef artist-creators Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim, in which they arrange corals into vast wall-mounted “paintings.”
The Wertheims are especially pleased to see the Reef that’s come to fruition in Pittsburgh, home of the Andy Warhol Museum, the site of the first Crochet Coral Reef exhibition in 2006.
The Pittsburg Satellite Reef has been organized by Alyssa Velazquez, a curatorial assistant of decorative arts and design at Carnegie Museum of Art.
See New York Times article about the project+exhibition.
See here for more about the science and mathematics behind the Crochet Coral Reef project, which marries art, craft, mathematics and marine biology in a collaborative artistic response to climate change and the destruction of living reefs worldwide.
The Pittsburgh Satellite Reef is part of the Crochet Coral Reef project by Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim of the Institute for Figuring. It has been organized for Carnegie Museum of Art by Alyssa Velazquez. Collaborative workshops for the exhibition were held with community partners Kid Ewe Knot and Upstream PGH at Trace Brewing, Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium, Carnegie Museum of Art, the Madwomen in the Attic Creative Writing Program at Carlow University, and Carnegie Mellon University’s Yarnivores. 281 people contributed to the project.
The Pittsburgh Satellite Reef has been generously supported by The Charity Randall Foundation.
Curatorial Framing
Instead of writing a traditional Curatorial Statement for the exhibition, Ms Valezquez chose to create a poem, articulating her thoughts about the project as a visual text organized in an algorithmic fashion, thereby alluding to the algorithmic nature of the crochet models themselves.
About the Crochet Coral Reef
The Crochet Coral Reef is a research-oriented project by sisters Christine Wertheim and Margaret Wertheim of the Institute For Figuring. Residing at the intersection of mathematics, marine biology, handicraft, and community art practice, the project responds to the environmental crisis of global warming and the escalating problem of oceanic plastic trash by highlighting not only the damage humans do to earth’s ecology, but also our power for positive action. The Wertheims’ Crochet Coral Reef collection has been exhibited worldwide, including at the 58th Venice Biennale, Helsinki Biennial, The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), Hayward Gallery (London), Science Gallery (Dublin), Museum of Arts and Design (New York), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (Washington, DC), and Museum Frieder Burda (Germany). The project also encompasses a community program in which nearly 25,000 people around the world have participated in making 52 locally-based Satellite Reefs, in New York, Chicago, Melbourne, Ireland, Latvia, Germany, Austria, UAE, and elsewhere. The Pittsburgh Satellite Reef is one of the latest additions to this ever-evolving wooly archipelago.
About the Crochet Coral Reef Artists
Margaret Wertheim is a science writer, artist, and author of books on the cultural history of physics. Christine Wertheim is an experimental poet, performer, artist and writer, and former faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts. Margaret and Christine conduct the Crochet Coral Reef project through their Los Angeles-based organization, the Institute For Figuring, an interdisciplinary practice dedicated to engaging audiences with the poetic dimensions of science and mathematics though materially embodied activities. The IFF is at once an art endeavor and a framework for innovative public science engagement.
