The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef
Show at the Chicago Cultural Center in Illinois
Midwestern crocheters, crocheters visiting the Chicagoland Area, and those who appreciate crochet, will want to check out The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef in Chicago.
Midwesterners, crocheters, biologists, oceanographers, mathematicians, visual artists, and crochet enthusiasts alike: The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef has arrived at the Chicago Cultural Center. This amazing display is a must-see for all art lovers.
Background
The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef was launched by Australian sisters Christine and Margaret Wertheim, the co-founding directors of the Los Angeles-based Institute for Figuring. The exhibition is composed of a series of coral reefs meticulously fashioned, largely out of yarn, by the Wertheims and their collaborators around the world, and is intended to call attention to the desperate plight of some of the most astonishing wonders of the marine world--in particular, the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland, Australia. The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef is organized by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs in cooperation with the Chicago Humanities Festival.
As it happens, for millions of years, coral reefs have been mimicking a type of geometry—so called non-Euclidean hyperbolic space—which humans only came to conceptualize at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Even though the mathematics behind such space formed the basis, among other things, of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, no one could envision precisely what such space might look like until 1997, when Dr. Daina Taimina, a physicist at Cornell University, showed that one could model such spaces using common crochet.
Christine and Margaret Wertheim, realizing that Dr. Taimina’s crochets echoed shapes found in the coral reefs off their homeland—looped kelps, fringed anemones and curly sponges—began fashioning their own wooly versions. As their collection grew, they solicited contributions from other artisans and began to create a crocheted coral reef. The result is The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, an exhibition that celebrates the hyperbolic geometry of the oceanic world and serves as a warning to the dangers of global warming, agricultural run-off and marine pollutants. This beautiful exhibition includes six reefs made up of tightly bunched mounds of brain coral, towered spires of pillar coral, blooms of carnation coral and wavy strands of kelp, all from yarn.
Audience
The display and its lighting are remarkably breathtaking. It gives the illusion of visiting the Barrier Reef. Such an original exhibition of this size is rare. The boost it provides to crochet art is substantial, as it is attracting artists and scientists alike.
Activities
Every Thursday at noon, throughout the run of the exhibition, members of the Windy City Knitting Guild will lead informal crochet workshops in the Chicago Cultural Center’s Chicago Rooms, teaching the skills needed to create a wooly reef. (Some materials will be available). The workshops are co-sponsored by The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, also in Chicago.
Another new reef, recently created by dozens of crocheters from the Chicagoland area, mobilized in conjunction with the Jane Addams Hull-House at the UIC, will be included in the exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center. This final reef, made from yarn and plastic garbage will be on view, in an attempt to showcase the compounding horror of plastic refuse that is already engulfing the marine world.
Viewing
Viewing hours for The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef at the Chicago Cultural Center are Mondays through Thursdays, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Fridays, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturdays 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The Chicago Cultural Center is closed on holidays. More information is available at the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs: 312.744.6630
