CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- The MIT Museum will 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 crocheter’s 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.”
