Zoom call hosted by Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park & Museum featuring Michele Navakas author of Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America, and Jill Krutick, creator of “Coral Beliefs”
July 14th, 2023 at 4 pm
LINK: Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84622657962
Meeting ID: 846 2265 7962
In a real life “coral reef” story…an artist and a writer both complete milestone projects on the fascinating topic of coral reefs during the summer of 2023. The artist — Jill Krutick — met the writer — Michele Navakas — during Krutick’s exhibition of the monumental 84-foot-long “Coral Beliefs” artwork at Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park & Museum in Hamilton, Ohio. Navakas is a professor of English and an affiliate of the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability at Miami University, located in Oxford, Ohio, just 30 minutes away from Krutick’s museum exhibition. Navakas just published a literary and cultural history of coral, Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America, TEN years in the making!
While Krutick and Navakas come from different backgrounds, they both realize the power of coral. Krutick, a finance and media executive turned artist, has blossomed as an abstract expressionist painter. The Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park & Museum show is her fourth solo museum exhibition. In Krutick’s words, “Coral reefs have become the language in which I communicate not only as an artist but also as a gallerist and entrepreneur. Over the past couple of years, I have opened my studio space to other artists. It is through my developing sense of inclusion and collaboration that I have grown my network of artists, expanded my global reach, and continued on the path of artistic discovery.”
Krutick’s “Coral Beliefs” is not only an eco-story designed to raise awareness of this fragile ecosystem, but also a life philosophy that defines her work as an artist. “Coral Beliefs” comprises 25 panels and each one is named a “belief” from Networking to Interactivity to Fury to Elation, for example. The work strives to capture not only the poetry Krutick sees when exploring the reef on her scuba dives (most recently in the Alphonse Atoll, Seychelles), but also the harsh reality of the suffocating, bleaching and pollution that are destroying it. The center of the piece is like a “Big Bang” or whirlwind of debris that explodes and ultimately gives way to a quest for a harmonious labyrinth of enchantment.
Navakas’s Coral Lives is a history of the human imagination of coral across many centuries. Centering largely on the American nineteenth century—Navakas’s field of specialty as a scholar—the book tells the story of coral as an essential element of the marine ecosystem, a personal ornament, a global commodity, and a powerful political metaphor. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including works by such writers as Sarah Josepha Hale, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and George Washington Cable, Navakas shows how coral once helped Americans to recognize both the potential and the limits of interdependence—to imagine that their society could grow, like a coral reef, by sustaining rather than displacing others.
Yet if coral seemed to some American writers to be a metaphor for a truly just collective society, it also showed them, by analogy, that society can seem most robust precisely when it is in fact most unfree for the laborers sustaining it. A trailblazing cultural history, Coral Lives reveals that coral has long been conceptually indispensable to humans, and its loss is more than biological. Without it, we lose some of our most complex political imaginings, recognitions, reckonings, and longings.
On July 14th Navakas and Krutick will be discussing their stories and connections to coral — the ultimate connector!
