Institute For Figuring

The Crochet Coral Reef is the subject of a feature article in The New York Times  Science section. Written by acclaimed math writer Siobhan Roberts, the piece has gone viral on the Times instagram – over 200,000 likes! More than for any NYT Insta-posts during the past month except Barbie at the Oscars and Taylor Swift at the Grammys. This for a story on math! Read Margaret’s Substack post about the importance of crafty hand-making as a way of engaging with abstract mathematical ideas.

The Reef project is also featured in a special section of the new issue of WEAD magazine (Women Eco Artists Dialog) devoted to Kinship: The Art of Connection.

Due to popular response, our exhibition at Schlossmuseum Linz has been extended to July, and ever-more people are crocheting corals for the magnificent archipelago of the Austrian Satellite Reef.

“Goldhauben Reef” and “Pod Worlds” at Schlossmuseum Linz.

An exhibition of the Crochet Coral Reef is on show at Schlossmuseum Linz  which also debutes a new Austrian Satellite Reef.

Over 100,000 hours of female labor; 30,000 coral pieces; and 2,000 contributors. The Austrian Satellite Reef is a mistress-ful retort to the modernist obsession with “individual genius.” Here is art collectively produced on a scale rarely seen in the contemporary world, and dynamically illustrating mathematical underpinnings of textile craft.

For this installation, Christine Wertheim and Margaret Wertheim collaborated with Schlossmuseum Linz to design a suite of crochet reefs based on Upper Austrian folk-art traditions. 2,000 people contributed to this intense, sparkling installation. All their names are projected on the gallery walls and can be seen here.

Exhibition dates: October 2023 – April 2024//Now extended by popular demand to July 2024.
See here for a photo-report on the show.

A new book about the Crochet Coral Reef is available from DAP. Titled Margaret and Christine Wertheim: Value and Transformation of Corals the text is published in conjunction with a major retrospective of this unique worldwide eco-artistic happening at Museum Frieder Burda in Germany. Now the largest art+science project on the planet, the Crochet Coral Reef is an elegiac response to the disappearing wonder of living reefs due to global warming and climate change, that also highlights the creative power of collective human action in the anthropogenic age. With essays about the scientific, mathematical, environmental, and community dimensions of the project, the volume also includes 200 pages of photos documenting 17 years of the Crochet Coral Reef endeavor, along with images of the extraordinary new Baden Baden Satellite Reef – the largest community reef to date with over 40,000 coral pieces. Essays by Donna Haraway, Heather Davis, Christine Wertheim, Margaret Wertheim, Doug Harvey, Udo Kittelmann, and others. Published by Weinand Verlag (German & English editions), distributed by DAP.

More about the book
Crochet Coral Reef website

Buy Book Now: on Bookshop.org
Buy Book Now: on ArtBook.com

Sample Book Pages

Launch of the Baden-Baden Satellite Reef in Burda Style magazine.

All of Germany is invited to participate in a nation-wide community crochet coral reef to be exhibited in 2022 at Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, the spa-city where Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment. This Baden-Baden Satellite Reef will be exhibited as part of a museum-wide retrospective of the Crochet Coral Reef, a global interdisciplinary art+science “happening” now in its 16th year. The Baden-Baden reef is launched in the pages of Burda Style, a beloved Deutsche women’s magazine. Science meets art meets fabulous feminist handicraft. In this special collaboration, artists Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim will work with the people of Germany on a curatorial vision inspired by the discovery of an ancient “pinnacle reef” in the remote Pacific Ocean east of the Great Barrier Reef. For inspirational images, and to contribute to this endeavor, see here on the dedicated Crochet Coral Reef website.

Cover of the German magazine that launches the Baden-Baden Satellite Reef.

Coral Forest – Helsinki, installed in an underground ammunition bunker built by the Russian army on Vallisaari Island, Finland.

The Crochet Coral Reef is in the Helsinki Biennial – opening June 12, 2021.

Helsinki Biennial 2021: The Same Sea, gathers together 40 artists and artist collectives whose work reflects on the interconnectedness of humans, the environment, and all living things. For the exhibition, Christine and Margaret Wertheim worked with the people of Helsinki to fabricate the Helsinki Satellite Reef – to which nearly 3000 Finns contributed. The Wertheim’s have also overseen construction of 4 new  Coral Forest sculptures assembled from an epic array of plastic crochet pieces by made by Helsinki Reefers. At once ludicrous and serious, these totemic works draw our attention to the tsunami of plastic trash pouring into the world’s oceans. This Helsinki Coral Forest is constructed entirely from recycled plastic, including 200+ kilos of offcuts from the industrial production of toilet paper packaging; the works are co-curated by Margaret and Christine along with a quartet of talented local ladies: Lotta Kjellberg, Elina Ahlstedt, Noora El Harouny and Tuija Maija Piironen. For more information about the biennial installation see here.

Team Finland: Elani, Lotta, Noora, and Tuija Maija, curators of the Helsinki Satellite Reef.

Periodic Talks podcast

In April, Margaret Wertheim is a guest on the new Stitcher podcast Periodic Talks, hosted by the actress-duo Gillian Jacobs (Netflix LOVE, Community) and Diona Reasonover (NCIS).

Periodic Talks is a podcast devoted to amazing women working in science, technology, mathematics, and engineering – from a NASA mission controller, to a virtual reality developer, a molecular biologist/rapper, and Margaret as a pioneer of science+art.

Stitcher’s website describes the endeavor thus:
“What gets you curious? Virtual experiences, celestial bodies, water worlds or maybe just the tiniest mysteries inside your brain? The endlessly curious and curiously funny, Gillian Jacobs (Community, Netflix’s LOVE) and Diona Reasonover (NCIS), step off set to go on tangents with real-life astronauts, astrophysicists, science artists, mathematician-types and other really smart people that investigate what seems impossible.”

The Crochet Coral Reef is featured in Nature – the world’s premier science magazine – in an essay about how art can help scientists think more creatively. Download PDF Margaret and Christine Wertheim are also included in a special international issue of the Dutch art journal See All This celebrating women artists, curated by Catherine de Zegher. Other artists include Judy Chicago, Frieda Kahlo, Agnes Denes, Eva Hesse, Leonora Carrington, Georgia O’Keefe, and Ruth Azawa.

Nature | Vol 590 | 11 February 2021 | p351-353

See All This | No. 20 | Winter 2020/2021

Christine and Margaret Wertheim in See All This | No 20 | Winter 2020/2021

“Coral Forest” by Margaret and Christine Wertheim and the Institute For Figuring, at Lehigh University Art Galleries. Photo by Stephanie Veto for LUAG.

At once intimate and collective, the Crochet Coral Reef offers a unique model of art-making in the time of COVID. While the world shelters at home, three new Satellite Reefs are blooming into being. Under the auspices of the Helsinki Art Museum, thousands of Finnish crafters are crocheting corals for a display at the 2021 Helsinki Biennial. Toronto crocheters have been called into action by the Ontario Science Center, where an Ontario Satellite Reef will be shown alongside a major exhibition of the IFF’s own crochet reefs. And at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign the Urbana-Champaign Satellite Reef will feature a “day-glow” black-light sub-reef. By collectively mirroring the quiet productivity of the living reefs we emulate, we crochet “reefers” are building works of art that call attention to the crisis of global warming while also offering an alternative vision for what art-making can be – communal, humble, joyous, hand-made, and attuned to the webs of life.

• Helsinki Satellite Reef – Hosted by the Helsinki Biennial and Helsinki Art Museum (Finland). Presented at the Helsinki Biennial 2021, in conjunction with site-specific sculptures by Christine and Margaret Wertheim collaborating with local coral reefers.
• Ontario Satellite Reef – Hosted by the Ontario Science Center (Toronto, Canada). Presented in conjunction with an exhibition of the IFF’s Crochet Coral Reefs.
• Urbana-Champaign Satellite Reef – Hosted by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, School of Art and Design. (Project Press Release)

Blackboard drawing of geo-primes by Margaret Wertheim and Richard Nielsen at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

IFF director Margaret Wertheim has made a discovery about a geometric representation of prime numbers. This “geo-prime” system visually encodes the essential difference between prime and composite numbers, and gives a graphical meaning to the statement that the primes are the atomic elements of the integers. Links can be made between geo-primes, group theory, knot theory, and the Fourier Transform (the math underlying spectral analysis of music and holography). This is college level mathematics encountered through drawing.

The IFF is holding a series of “prime playing” workshops – the first 2 were at the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the LA Public Library. To receive info about future workshops email us at: mail@theiff.org.

Prime playing drawings from workshop at LA Public Library, 03/10/2020

Computer rendering of the geo-prime representation of 210.

Computer rendering of geo-prime 210||103.

Computer render of zooming in to the “black hole” at the heart of geo-prime 997||498.

Thanks to Tristan Duke for coding Rhino/Grasshopper program to compute geo-prime images.