Berkshires Creating with Crochet Coral Reef Project
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — More than a dozen people of all ages were crocheting colorful versions of coral out of yarn on Friday at the Berkshire Art Center's Gallery Shop on North Street.
Their creations will become part of the worldwide Crochet Coral Reef Project, which has attracted thousands of participants from around the world.
Williams College in Williamstown has been collaborating with community members and local organizations on artists Christine and Margaret Wertheims' international project that will become part of a life-size installation.
"What we're going to be doing is working with the campus and the community together to create a living and breathing reef that will be exhibited in the '62 Center for Theatre and Dance during Earth Week of April 2026," said Amy Holzapfel, Williams College Frederick Latimer Wells professor of theatre and chair at a Friday workshop in Pittsfield.
"It's going to be an immersive installation with sound and lights and people. Everyone who is an artist in the project, which means anyone who makes a coral or participates in some way, will be seeing their work exhibited as part of this beautiful exhibition."
In preparation for the exhibit, the college has been holding workshops on the first of every month at select locations, during which participants are given instructions and kits to create the Berkshires Satellite Reef.
Holzapfel and Art Center Executive Director Laura Dickstein Thompson have been friends for "forever," so when Holzapfel presented the opportunity to host crochet workshops, she jumped at the chance because it highlights the center's dedication to community and connecting through various artistic expressions.
The Stockbridge art school hopes to expand by offering exhibitions and artist residencies, and by bringing in an artist to re-envision the Pittsfield space, located at in the Brothership Building.
"For me, it is a way during our downtown celebration, First Friday, that we can bring in people into this space and to see what it's about. And you can see that they're all working together to make these little sculptural components through crochet that's going to be added to a larger project making a coral reef," said Thompson.
No experience in crochet is necessary to participate in the workshops and there are a weekly crochet circles on Friday afternoons at the Milne Public Library in Williamstown and Friday evenings at the Berkshire Art Center in Stockbridge. Participants can also crochet at home by following the provided written or video instructions here.
Although beginners are welcome at the circles, formal instruction and materials are not guaranteed.
The materials used for the project have been upcycled or made of recyclable material, including plastic yarn, Holzapfel said. Learn how to donate yarn for the project here.
"It's not even so much about the product as about the active participation of anyone who wants to learn to crochet and participate. So, however many corals we make is beautiful," Holzapfel said.
"It's about bringing people together in a time when there's very few opportunities for community. For communities to come together and make and be part of something larger than themselves. It's giving people the chance to sit down with others, be in community learning a skill that hopefully they'll have for the rest of their lives."
The next workshop takes place on Monday, Sept. 1, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. at the '62 Center. More information here.
People are hungry for finding ways to share art, coming together, and spreading awareness about things that they care about, such as climate justice, Holzapfel said.
"It's about bringing attention to climate change, but it's also about gathering the public together to participate in a larger effort," she said.
The exhibit, Berkshire Satellite Reef, is one of many community art projects that has come out of the Crochet Coral Reef Project.
The Wertheims' Institute for Figuring develops physical activities to present abstract concepts in art forms, such plastics and the environment and trade relations.
The coral reef project intersects mathematics, handicraft, and environmentalism and aims to raise awareness about the decline of coral reefs because of global warming and ocean acidification, Margaret Wertheim told the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art in 2013.
"It's a lovely project because it emerges from my sister Christine's realization that if you deviated from the pure, mathematically perfect hyperbolic structure, which is what [Cornell professor Daina Taimina] had worked out how to do … and start making the code a bit wonky, they immediately look more natural," she said.
Nature isn’t mathematically perfect, Wertheim said.
"There's lots of things in nature that are spherical like but there's no such thing as a pure sphere in nature… and so, there's no such thing as perfect hyperbolic structure in nature. Nature loves deviation, mutation," she said.
"Materials have qualities that introduce their own kinds of aberrancies into the mathematical ideal. So, once we started playing around with deviating the code, we began to have these things that really began to look like real coral structures."
Margaret and Christine, twins, started the project in 2005 because it was becoming evident to scientists that the "devastation of coral reefs" was happening globally due to global warming and rising sea temperatures, Margaret told the Ontario Science Centre in 2021.
When the project started it was "inconceivable" that we would live in a world without coral reefs.
"It was inconceivable that we could face a future without reefs, 16 years later, scientists are now warning that if we don't change our practices and see temperatures keep rising, coral reefs could be gone by the middle of this century, like in the next 20 or 30 years," she said.
During the Ontario presentation, Margaret explained how two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef had been devastated.
"The Great Barrier Reef … is the largest living organism on planet Earth. It's the first living thing as you approach Earth from outer space…is the first living thing you can see. It's bigger than the Amazon rainforest, and yet, two thirds of it has been devastated," she said.
In 2024, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority concluded that "the overall outlook for the Great Barrier Reef remains one of future deterioration due largely to climate change … despite some habitats and species improving over the past five years thanks to windows of low disturbance and decades of protection and management."
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