MIT MUSEUM PRESENTS CROCHET CORAL REEF, AN EXHIBITION TRANSFORMING FIBER ART INTO COLLECTIVE CLIMATE ACTION

Cambridge, MA, July 20, 2026 — The MIT Museum is pleased to present Crochet Coral Reef, on view from August 14, 2026, to February 14, 2027. Featuring a series of hand-crocheted forms inspired by the beauty and complexity of coral reefs, the exhibition centers on the work of Australian artists and sisters Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim, alongside the paper sculpture explorations of Erik and Martin Demaine, which help visualize and understand unsolved problems in science. Converging art, mathematics, marine science, and community participation, the exhibition invites visitors into an immersive exploration of one of the planet's most extraordinary and threatened ecosystems.

This exhibition is the first of OCEANS, the MIT Museum’s thematic season dedicated to unlocking the mysteries of our ocean planet. As ocean temperatures rise and coral reefs bleach at unprecedented rates, understanding and preserving these vital yet largely unexplored ecosystems is more essential than ever. The Wertheim sisters’ Crochet Coral Reef’s powerful display of community-led making at the intersection of art and science opens the Museum’s season of exhibitions, programs, and events that will continue to spotlight the critical importance of the world’s oceans.

Although coral reefs occupy less than 1% of the ocean floor, they are home to over a quarter of marine life. Despite their small scale, these ecosystems are essential to the health of our planet’s oceans and are dying at record rates, bleached by rising ocean temperatures and other human-induced environmental stressors. Artists and advocates Christine and Margaret Wertheim, and their thousands of global collaborators, have responded with Crochet Coral Reef, an ever-growing public engagement project and artwork. The body of work presents a compelling series of handmade chromatic forms, mirroring living corals, while exploring the hyperbolic mathematics embedded within these threatened marine ecosystems.

The pieces on view at the MIT Museum are illustrative of the corals they seek to protect, with hundreds of thousands of hours of stitching that reflects the immense amount of time required for reefs to form on the ocean floor. Each crocheters' contribution suggests that of a coral polyp, underscoring an essential truth shared by both reef ecosystems and humanity itself: our collective survival depends on countless interconnected individuals, working together in ways too often overlooked.

A combination of applied mathematics and handcraft, Crochet Coral Reef builds on the hyperbolic modeling method developed by mathematician Dr. Daina Taimina in 1997 using crochet. Adopting and extending Taimina's technique, the Wertheims and their global community have, since 2005, evolved a woolly taxonomy that simulates the hyperbolic frills of corals, kelps, and other sea creatures, bolstering their output with diverse contributions from more than 30,000 craftspeople across 50 cities and countries.

Since its inception, the community-driven, globally sourced project has been exhibited internationally, including shows at Venice Biennale (2019) and Helsinki Biennial (2021), growing into one of the world’s largest participatory art-and-science initiatives. Just as the planet’s oceans connect continents, Crochet Coral Reef has connected thousands of creators internationally to make a resounding statement against climate change’s impact on sea life.

In addition to the Wertheims’ work, two sculptures by Erik Demaine and Martin Demaine, a father-son mathematician-artist duo based in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will be presented. Though distinct from the Crochet Coral Reef, the Demaines’ practice shares a similar and central preoccupation with rendering hyperbolic forms, made tangible through handwork. Where the Wertheims and their collaborators wield crochet hooks and yarn to model the curves of coral and kelp, the Demaines coax the same elusive geometry from folded sheets of paper.

Michael John Gorman, The Mark R. Epstein (Class of 1963) Director of the MIT Museum, said: “Few ecosystems echo the interconnected nature of our world as clearly as coral reefs, where a multitude of organisms depend upon one another to thrive. Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim’s Crochet Coral Reef reflects this reality, bringing together thousands of artists and crafters across the world in a collective act of making that echoes the marine ecosystems it spotlights. This project brings together coral reef ecology, art and mathematics, and we are delighted that this exhibition will also serve as a springboard for an exciting new collaboration between Margaret Wertheim and MIT mathematician Erik Demaine supported by MIT’s Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST).”

Artists Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim, said: “The night we conceived the Crochet Coral Reef project in 2005 we joked that if the Great Barrier Reef in our home country, Australia, ever died out, our handcrafted reef may be something to remember it by. This sentiment is no longer a jest: today scientists warn that global warming threatens the very foundation of reef ecosystems. Unless human carbon dioxide output is reduced, reefs worldwide may be wiped out this century – perhaps sooner. MIT Museum’s timely OCEANS thematic season draws attention to the magnificence of our seas while also highlighting threats to oceanic stability and the wonder of marine life. The curly, crenellated, forms we made are inspired by the strange ‘hyperbolic’ geometry embodied in many living corals, and we are especially pleased to be part of an exhibition at MIT, one of the world’s foremost math/science research institutions. Our project is quintessentially an interdisciplinary practice residing at the nexus of art, science, mathematics, marine biology and community praxis, which points to interconnections between domains of knowledge usually kept in separate siloes.”

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Coral Forest
​Christine Wertheim, Margaret Wertheim, and the Institute For Figuring
​2006–2026

Comprising three towering sculptures, the Wertheim sisters’ Coral Forest is a series of three crocheted sculptures named for mythological figures associated with the sea. Works Stheno and Medusa, crafted from colorful yarn, evoke the hues of a healthy living reef, whereas Nin Imma, fashioned from recycled plastic, warns of the impacts of coral reef bleaching.

Pod Worlds
​Christine Wertheim, Margaret Wertheim, and the Institute For Figuring
​Courtesy of Schlossmuseum Linz, Austria
​2006–2026

Pod Worlds comprises a collection of vitrines, each containing a miniature ecosystem condensed to the scale of a specimen display. Together, these installations highlight some of the most intricate contributions within the broader Crochet Coral Reef project. Materials vary from one pod to the next, from yarn, beadwork, and electroluminescent wire to fragments of plastic collected from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Five Fathoms Deep
​Christine Wertheim, with assistance from the Baden Baden Satellite Reef curatorial team: Kathrin Dorfner, Martina Schulz, Christina Humpert, Charlotte Reiter, Susan Reiss and Silke Habich, with master-carpenter Arnd Merkle
​Courtesy of the Institute For Figuring
​2022

Five Fathoms Deep, a wall-mounted “coral painting,” originated from the 2021–2022 Baden Baden Satellite Reef, a community-led extension of the larger Crochet Coral Reef initiative spearheaded by Christine Wertheim for Museum Frieder Burda in Germany. More than 4,000 participants collectively crocheted over 5,000 individual components, which were ultimately assembled into this layered, large-scale composition.

Thinking Hard
​Erik Demaine and Martin Demaine
​Mi-Teintes paper
​2026

Nerd Snipe
​Erik Demaine and Martin Demaine
​Mi-Teint

The two sculptures by Erik and Martin Demaine explore the possibilities of the medium of paper as it folded along curved creases. By scoring concentric circular creases that alternate between mountain and valley folds, the paper “self-folds” into a pleated form approximating a hyperbolic surface with negative curvature. Each work also encodes layered mathematical puzzles, printed onto the paper’s surface in fonts of the artists’ design.

RELATED PROGRAMMING

Community Crochet Coral Reef workshops will be held for the MIT community at the MIT Museum as part of the CAST Visiting Artist Residency collaboration between Margaret and Christine Wertheim and MIT Professor in Computer Science Erik Demaine. The resulting collaboration will synthesize parabolic crochet techniques with Demaines' expertise in curved origami. Corals crocheted out of yarn and plastics will be assembled into a wall mural in early 2027 to cap off the OCEANS theme.

About The MIT Museum:
​The MIT Museum welcomes all to participate in MIT’s unique culture of problem-solving and playful creativity, bringing together science, technology, art, and design in surprising ways to explore potential futures.

In addition to exhibitions, programs, a maker hub and learning labs, the museum invites visitors to take part in ongoing research while demonstrating how science and innovation will shape the future of society. In October 2022, a reinvented MIT Museum opened in a new location in the heart of Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA.

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About Margaret and Christine Wertheim:
​Margaret Wertheim is science writer whose work focuses on relations between science and the wider cultural landscape. She is the author of seven books, including a trilogy about the history of physics: Pythagoras’s Trousers, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, and Physics on the Fringe. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Guardian, Cabinet, Aeon and many others. She is currently working on a book about the concept of ‘dimension’ in math, physics, data-science, art and culture.

Christine Wertheim (PhD) is a writer and artist whose books include three poetic suites The Book of Me, mUtter-bAbel, and +|’me’S-pace. These fuse graphics and text to explore the potentialities of the English tongue, and relationships between infantile rage and global violence. Her poetry and critical writings have appeared in Cabinet, X-tra, BOMB and others. From 1993-2000 she taught in the fine art department at Goldsmiths College (London), and from 2001-2021 in the department of critical studies at the California Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles), where she is now an emerita.

About The Institute for Figuring:
​At once a framework for artistic practice and radical pedagogy, the IFF’s mission is to contribute to the public understanding of scientific and mathematical themes through innovative programming that includes exhibitions, workshops, and participatory, community-based projects. The acronym – IFF – is the logical symbol for “if and only if”, one of the “operators” underlying modern computing; yet “if and only if” also alludes to the possibilities opened up when imaginative constraints are relaxed and the mind is capitulated into a field of play.

The IFF’s interests are twofold: the manifestation of figures in the world around us, and the figurative technologies humans have developed through the ages. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring.

Through the IFF, Margaret and Christine have developed exhibitions and programs for museums, galleries, and other cultural organizations, including the Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), Hayward Gallery (London), Science Gallery (Dublin), Art Center College of Design (Pasadena), University of California Santa Cruz (CA), Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles), Museum of Arts and Design (NYC), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (Washington, D.C)

About Erik Demaine and Martin Demaine
​Erik Demaine and Martin Demaine are a father-son math-art team in EECS/CSAIL at MIT. They use their exploration in sculpture to help visualize and understand unsolved problems in science, and their scientific abilities to inspire new art forms.

MIT Museum credits:

Artists:

Curation:

MIT Museum gratefully acknowledges the Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) for grants that support interdisciplinary arts installations and programs.

For more information on Margaret Wertheim’s work and residency with CAST, please visit: https://arts.mit.edu/people/margaret-wertheim/ ​

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