“Branched Aneoma Garden” with “Coral Forests – Stheno and “Nim Imma.”

While parts of the Crochet Coral Reef are in the Venice Biennale, other portions are on show at Lehigh University Art Galleries in Bethlehem, PA. In Venice, the installations focus on the delicate natural history dimension of the project highlighting bejeweled confections featured in our Bleached Reef, Toxic Reef and miniature coral Pod Worlds. At Lehigh, the show is framed around six giant Coral Forest sculptures – three crafted from yarn and three from plastics. Where the yarn works reference the organic beauty of living corals, the plastic pieces call attention to the post-modern present suffused with throw-away synthetics. Named Medusa, Stheno, Eryali, Ea, Nin Imma, and Chthulu – after the Gorgons of Greek mythology – these sculptures collectively stand like a surreal undersea forest inviting visitors into a space of contemplation at once joyously absurd and tragic. Within the forest is a vitrine housing the Branched Anemone Garden, a crocheted coraline diorama inspired by the Great Barrier Reef along with the blood-orange hues and paleolithic drama of Australia’s Kimberly Desert. Now that real reefs are disappearing at an unprecedented pace these crochet reefs may one day be a reminder of what we have so carelessly destroyed.

Lehigh University Art Galleries – Exhibition website

The works on display are crocheted by Margaret and Christine Wertheim, with contributions from: Shari Porter, Helen Bernasconi, Sarah Simons, David Orozco, Evelyn Hardin, Jill Schrier, Tane Clark, Nancy Yahrous, Jane Canby, Helen Bernasconi, Anitra Menning, Marianne Midelburg, Helle Jorgensen, Anna Mayer, Jemima Wyman, Christina Simons, Jing Wong, Clare O’Callaghan, Kathleen Greco, Matthew Adnams,  Shari Porter, Heather McCarren, Una Morrison, Beverly Griffith, Gina Cacciolo, Pate Conaway, Barbara Wertheim, Katherine Wertheim, plus Tija Viksna and the Latvian Satellite Reef crafters.

Photo Gallery – Click on any image to enlarge.

“Branched Anemone Garden” with vitrine reflections, plus “Coral Forest – Nin Imma”, crocheted from plastic shopping bags and saran wrap.

“Coral Forest – Ea”, crocheted from plastic shopping bags, video tape and found plastic debris. The work is photographed under EcoTech Marine aquarium illumination lights.

Coral Forests: Stheno (yarn), Nin Imma (white plastic), Eryali (yarn) and Chthulu (video tape).

“Branched Anemone Garden” and “Coral Forest – Stheno.”

“Coral Forest – Medusa.”

• Also in the exhibition is the Latvian Isola by Tija Viksna and the Latvian Satellite Reef crocheters; plus Carnation Mound by Marianne Midelburg and Sarah Simons.
• Branched Anemone Garden is loaned from the collection of Lisa Yun Lee.
• Coral Forest – Stheno is loaned from the collection of Jorian Polis Schutz.

Exhibition design by Mark Wonslider and William Crow.

All photos © IFF by Margaret Wertheim

The IFF acknowledges ongoing support for the Crochet Coral Reef project from the Opaline Fund of the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund.

Tomorrow is the first Getty Center convening to discuss their Pacific Standard Time theme for 2024 – PST: Art x Science x LA. At the event, IFF director, Margaret Wertheim, is giving an artist talk about the Institute’s Crochet Coral Reef project and its underlying thesis that mathematics can be conceptualized as a kind of material play. Just as music can be symbolically notated but is mostly performed without recurse to written scores, so mathematics also has symbolic and performative modes. Wertheim’s talk will explore how we can use materially-based arts techniques to empower citizens to play mathematics and to perform acts of freeform mathematical invention.

From the Getty Website:

Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x LA
Coming in 2024

Left: Códice de la Cruz-Badiano, 1553, page 38 (detail). Collection INAH, Mexico. Image licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0). Center: Engraving and aquatint of color wheel (detail) composed by René Henri Digeon, engraver, and Lamoureux, printer. In Michel Eugène Chevreul, Des couleurs et de leurs applications aux arts industriels à l’aide des cercles chromatiques (Paris, 1864). The Getty Research Institute, 90-B8575. Right: Design for the Water Clock of the Peacocks (detail). In Badi’ al-Zaman ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, Book of the Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, 1315. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, www.metmuseum.org

Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x LA will be the third in the Getty’s influential Pacific Standard Time series of regional collaborations. It will present an ambitious range of exhibitions and public programs that look at art through the lens of science, and at science through the lens of art.

As in previous Pacific Standard Time initiatives, individual institutions will develop their own projects to explore the overall theme. This time, the Getty will expand the initiative by inviting the participation of world-renowned scientific institutions across Southern California.

The initiative will reveal the many connections between the visual arts and science from prehistoric times to the present day and across different cultures worldwide. From alchemy to anatomy, and from climate change to artificial intelligence, PST: Art x Science x LA will create an opportunity for civic dialogue around urgent problems of our time.

An open competition for research grants that engage with all dimensions of the ties between art and science will open for museums in the fall of 2019, with awards announced in 2020.

Related Links

• Press Release
• Foundation Grants

Entrance to the Arsenale at the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Photo © IFF.

The Crochet Coral Reef is in the Venice Biennale. The 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia titled May You Live in Interesting Times is curated by Ralph Rugoff and features 79 artists from around the world each represented by 2 installations – one in the Arsenale and one in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini. Crochet Coral Reef creators Christine Wertheim and Margaret Wertheim are the sole Australian artists.

Among Rugoff’s propositions for this wide-ranging show is that in our age of “fake news and alternative facts” art cannot be pigeonholed. Instead of a formal theme Rugoff offers a curatorial strategy that opens out to a cross-section of artists working in diverse genres responding in multiple modalities to the changing times we live in. True to this spirit, the 2019 Biennale Arte is the first to have 50% women. Also included are a large number of artists hailing from outside Europe and the US. While stressing that art cannot solve political problems or be a panacea for the ills unsettling our social and environmental landscapes, Rugoff suggests that “in an indirect fashion, perhaps art can be a kind of guide for how to live and think in ‘interesting times.’” As he writes:

“May You Live in Interesting Times will take seriously art’s potential as a method for looking into things that we do not already know – things that may be off-limits, under-the-radar, or otherwise inaccessible for various reasons. It will highlight artworks that explore the interconnectedness of diverse phenomena, and that convey an affinity with the idea, asserted by both Leonardo da Vinci and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, that ‘everything connects with everything else.'”

At the Biennale, two subsets of the Crochet Coral Reef are on show, both highlighting the natural history dimension of the project. In the Arsenale, vitrines housing the Bleached Reef and Toxic Reef are augmented with a site-specific Mathematics Blackboard depicting the hyperbolic geometry underlying the work. Also on display are Reef contributor Helen Bernasconi’s meticulous Hyperbolic Sea Snake and contributor Eleanor Kent’s Electroluminescent Wire Corals crafted from Israeli-made, military-grade EL wire used for lighting the insides of tanks.

On display in the Central Pavilion, in a tiny chapel-like space painted Giotto blue, is a selection of miniature coral Pod Worlds featuring works by some of the Crochet Reef’s most skilled contributors. Together these installations call attention to the imminent threat to living reefs while also highlighting the potential of collective action by humans and cnidarians. By building together, crochet reefers emulate the colony-based processes by which living reefs evolve and form, thus mathematics and craft combine into an art that recapitulates nature’s methodologies.

Works in the show are by Margaret and Christine Wertheim, with contributions from: Nadia Severns, Kathleen Greco, Sarah Simons, Anitra Menning, Sue Von Ohlsen, Rebecca Peapples, Vonda N. MyIntyre, Lucia daVilla Havilan, Anita Bruce, Mieko Fukuhara, Dagma Frinta, Evelyn Hardin, Nancy Lewis, Marianne Middelberg, Arlene Mintzer, Jill Schreier, Pamela Stiles, Barbara Van Elsen, Irene Lundgaard, Una Morrison, Anna Mayer, Christina Simons, Helen Bernasconi and Eleanor Kent; with vintage doilies by unknown makers and bridal adornments by unknown Chinese factory workers.

Read Ralph Rugoff’s Curatorial Statement

Venice Biennale website: Christine Wertheim and Margaret Wertheim

Venice Biennale website: List of Participating Artists

Biennale Catalog essay about the Crochet Coral Reef is authored by Leslie Dick.

Photo Gallery – Click on any image to enlarge.

In the Arsenale: “Toxic Reef” and “Bleached Reef,” with the “Mathematics Blackboard.” Photo © IFF.

In the Arsenale: “Bleached Reef” with “Mathematics Blackboard”.Photo © IFF.

In the Giardini: Jewel-like coral “Pod Worlds”. Photo courtesy La Biennale di Venezia, Italo Rondinella.

In the Giardini: Coral “Pod Worlds”. Photo © IFF.

In the Arsenale: “Bleached Reef”. Photo © IFF.

In the Giardini: “Pod World – Hyperbolic”. Photo courtesy Photo courtesy La Biennale di Venezia, Italo Rondinella.

In the Arsenale: “Toxic Reef” crocheted from video tape, yarn, and tinsel, sitting on a bed of sand adorned with plastic medical waste, ring pull tops, and glitter. Photo © IFF.

In the Arsenale – “Mathematics Blackboard”. Photo © IFF.

In the Arsenale: Electroluminescent wire corals by Eleanor Kent and Margaret Wertheim. Photo © IFF.

In the Giardini: Coral “Pod Worlds”. Photo © IFF.

“Mathematics Blackboard”. Photo © IFF.

Giardini signage – Biennale Arte 2019. Photo © IFF.

The Wertheim’s installations at the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia are supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, the Opaline Fund of the Jewish Federation and Community Foundation, Muriel Pollia Foundation, Anna Charlesworth and Peter Stephens, Jennifer Steele, Lauren Bon.

Thanks to Richard Nielsen for assisting in the drawing of the Mathematics Blackboard, and to IFF art assistant Christina Simons.

The IFF is a participating artist in the exhibition Plastic Entanglements: Ecology Aethetics Materials, a traveling exhibit about humanity’s relationship with plastic. From Feb 8 – July 28, the show will be on display at Smith College Museum of Art, after previous shows at the Palmer Museum of Art (University of Pennsylvania) and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (University of Oregon). The IFF has several plastic hyperbolic crochet sculptural works in the show, along with two new totemic works by IFF co-director Christine Wertheim constructed from discarded electrical cables and found plastic debris.

On Wednesday October 10, IFF director Margaret Wertheim is doing a conversation at the New York Academy of Sciences, entitled “The Mystery of Our Mathematical Reality”. Ms. Wertheim will be in conversation with renowned string theorist Dr. Sylvester James Gates, one of our nation’s few African-American professors of physics. The event is moderated by Steve Paulson, host of NPR’s acclaimed show To the Best Of Our Knowledge, and will later be broadcast there. The discussion will delve into Eugene Wigner’s famous comment about “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in nature,” and what does it mean that we find math so widely and fruitfully embodied in material things

The event is part of the NYAS series “What is the Nature of Reality?”

Event webpage: