Beatriz Chachamovits was skeptical eighteen years ago when a stranger invited her to swim off the coast of Bahia, Brazil, to see coral reefs up close. “There are these moments in your life that your gut tells you to trust, and that was one,” says the São Paulo native, who was studying at the arts-focused Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado at the time. As she held her breath and plunged into a Technicolor tunnel of corals, swaying fish, and spotted rays, her entire world split open.
After years of subsequent diving, and plenty of marine research, anxiety for the reefs joined her fascination with them—in the Florida Keys, 98 percent of the coral coverage has succumbed to pollution and dangerously warming waters. “I wondered, ‘Why isn’t anyone talking about this?’” Chachamovits, who is thirty-seven, recalls. “I told myself, I was gonna talk about this.” To do so, the environmental artist works from her Miami ceramics studio to replicate the reefs of South Florida, piecing together the hand-built organisms, inspired by how they appear in nature—a community of staghorn, brain, and elkhorn corals, for instance, all bleached due to expelling their symbiotic algae as a survival response to too-hot water. “We can’t protect what we don’t love or know,” she says. “I want people to fall in love with corals, to be able to identify with their beauty.”
Chachamovits’s extensive diving with experts on the front lines of the fight to save coral informs her sculptures, as do a collection of dry and wet marine specimens and a few surprising tools: sea urchin spines and star-bit screwdriver heads she stamps into the curves of massive clay starlet coral, to create naturalistic patterns. After she fires the pieces once, they’re extremely fragile—but while many artists mourn broken sculptures, Chachamovits embraces them: She means for her pieces to live in the wild, to be handled by viewers—and, yes, to fracture. “It was important for the breakage to happen, and for guests to have the tactile experience of holding endangered and disappearing coral in their hands,” she says. “I want people to understand our collective actions.”
Chachamovits balances her climate anxiety with hope for restoration, inspired by her years leading classes and workshops with more than a thousand students in Miami-Dade schools and beyond. The children’s curiosity and joy when she brings in her specimen collection, and when they create corals from air-dry clay, are contagious. She recalls the hundreds of kids who helped her build a public shoreline installation of her work. “Even though they learned these ecosystems were dying, there wasn’t one kid who didn’t have a smile on their face.”
Homebase: Miami, Florida
Affiliations: Miami-Dade County Public Schools
Side Quest: This past spring, Chachamovits collaborated with Miami Beach Senior High students on Heliotropic Seekers, an installation the City of Miami Beach commissioned for the Elevate Española public art initiative. She laser-cut colorful plexiglass silhouettes of endangered native fish and coral, which hung above Española Way, and the teens created stencils for a complementary mural they helped complete along the historic street.
Read about all of G&G’s 2024 Champions of Conservation.
