Institute For Figuring’s Crochet Coral Reef project, 2005– © Margaret and Christine Wertheim

An exhibition “Crochet Coral Reef: Toxic Seas” will be held at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York from September 15th. It celebrates the 10th anniversary of the “Crochet Coral Reef” (2005–present), an ongoing project by sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim.

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Mixing crocheted yarn with plastic trash, the work fuses mathematics, marine biology, feminist art practices, and craft to produce large-scale coralline landscapes, both beautiful and blighted. At once figurative, collaborative, worldly, and dispersed, the “Crochet Coral Reef” offers a tender response to the dual calamities facing marine life: climate change and plastic trash.

This exhibition consists of three main “habitats.” A giant Coral Forest and a collection of miniature Pod Worlds represent the diversity of living corals through the varying textures, colors, and forms of crocheted yarn and beads. Two Bleached Crochet Reefs serve as invocations of dying corals, while The Midden — four years’ worth of the Wertheims’ own plastic trash— constitutes a personal response to the issue of plastic waste in the oceans, and human-made phenomena such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The “Crochet Coral Reef” mixes environmental science with science fiction to create a call to action in this time of human impact and responsibility.

Crochet Coral Reef: Toxic Seas
Date: September 15th, 2016 – January 22nd, 2017
Open: 10:00 – 18:00 (Thursday and Friday till 21:00)
Closed on Monday
Place: Museum of Arts and Design
Address: 2 Columbus Circle, New York, NY 10019
Admission: General 16 $, Students 12 $, Members Free
Tel: +212 299 7777
https://madmuseum.org