Pod World - Hyperbolic, part of the worldwide Crochet Coral Reef project by Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim and the Institute For Figuring. Photo courtesy 58th Venice Biennale, by Francesco Galli.
Margaret Wertheim
2026–27 CAST Visiting Artist
Celebrating science as conceptual enchantment, interrogating science as social practice
About the Residency
Artist Margaret Wertheim leads a community-based hyperbolic crochet initiative in partnership with the MIT Museum and Erik Demaine, Professor in Computer Science, contributing to the Museum’s Oceans exhibition (on display August 2026–February 2027). Wertheim and her sister Christine are the creators of the Crochet Coral Reef project, the world’s largest participatory STEM art endeavor, with over 30,000 participants across 52 cities and countries. Many of the crocheted coral pieces realize the hyperbolic plane—a form of non-Euclidean geometry widely found in nature but difficult for humans to replicate—using techniques that make abstract mathematics tangible through handcraft.
During the 2026–27 CAST Artist Residency, Community Crochet Coral Reef workshops held for the MIT community at the MIT Museum synthesize the Wertheim’s parabolic crochet techniques with Demaine’s expertise in curved origami. The resulting corals, crocheted from yarn and plastic, will be assembled into a wall mural in early 2027.
Schedule
Crochet Coral Reef
August 14, 2026–February 14, 2027
MIT Museum
314 Main Street, Gambrill Center, Cambridge, MA
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, and their nonprofit, Institute For Figuring. 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.
Crochet Coral Reef’s powerful display of community-led making at the intersection of art and science opens the MIT Museum’s thematic season OCEANS. Running through March 2027, the series of exhibitions, programs, and events aim to unlock the mysteries and critical importance of our planet’s oceans.
Collaborators at MIT
Erik Demaine is a Professor in Computer Science at MIT with interests in most areas of research in mathematics and computer science broadly connected to algorithms, from data structures for improving web searches to the geometry of understanding how proteins fold to the computational difficulty of playing games. Demaine received a MacArthur Fellowship as a “computational geometer tackling and solving difficult problems related to folding and bending—moving readily between the theoretical and the playful, with a keen eye to revealing the former in the latter”.
Biography: MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL)
Website: erikdemaine.org
Biography
Margaret Wertheim is a writer and artist whose work focuses on relations between science and the wider cultural landscape. A two-fold perspective animates her work: on the one hand science can be seen as a set of conceptual enchantments that delight our minds and senses; on the other hand science is a socially embedded activity intersecting with philosophy, culture, and politics. Wertheim aims to illuminate both dimensions of science and mathematics through her books, articles, lectures, workshops, and exhibitions.
Website: margaretwertheim.com and crochetcoralreef.org
Social: Instagram