Coral Projects

I will bring to life Coral Projects, siting all 25 eco-contemporary, underwater artworks made of 100% ocean-friendly and sustainable materials at Oracabessa Bay Fish Sanctuary with the Elevate Prize. Coral Projects: Re-wilding a Painted Ocean is the world’s first underwater, eco-contemporary art exhibition. I collaborate with international, underrepresented artists to create a museum-quality presentation of Land-Art-scaled sculptures for corals to take over. The former-fishermen-turned-coral-gardeners at OBFS will plant baby corals from their nursery to bring the reef back from the brink of death. With Coral Projects I gift them inspiring and engaging art about idea to grow the reef. Coral Projects is one-part sustainable contemporary art and one-part a megaphone for good ocean stewardship. The Elevate Prize will fund all the production costs (site visits, international travel, housing, meals, materials and 25 artists’ honorariums,) administrative and marketing costs, the assistance of my local Jamaican partners who are coral gardeners to site the works, the filming of a documentary about the project, and educational outreach in the remote community, St. Mary Parish, Jamaica. With the Elevate Prize I will have the FULL financial resources required to bring Coral Projects’ sustainable art exhibition underwater for the ocean life to takeover!

My purpose is to heal the oceans, my ancestral line and the planet through sustainably and eco-friendly visual arts. With Coral Projects, I show other artists how to "green" their art practices and inspire everyone to become environmentally responsible with the power of thought-provoking art.

I, Vanessa Albury, am a visual artist, educator and environmental and social justice activist, raised in Nashville, TN and living in Brooklyn, NY. Coral Projects is my social practices, sustainable art project, fiscally sponsored by a 501(c)3. My vision is a world filled entirely with environmental and people-positive footprints; Every single fiber of our human impression made consciously with love and sustainable methods and materials.

Coral Projects creates eco-contemporary, 100% ocean-friendly, underwater artworks as one-part infrastructure for new coral and oyster growth, one-part contemporary art and one-part science communication. Everyone is paid fair wages. We support low-income communities and underrepresented artists. Coral Projects solves the science communications problem behind sustainability with an educational component for the viewer on the importance of ocean life and restoring coral and oyster habitats.

My goal is to fill the oceans with site-specific, eco-contemporary art exhibitions that promote good ocean stewardship and supports new baby coral and oyster growth.

Coral Projects saves the oceans with inspiring, eco-friendly contemporary art.

Coral Project solves 3 problems:

1) Global human activity has an unsustainable footprint. We need every aspect of society to become eco-friendly immediately. I take on the art world, which has the power to inspire and transform the entire system of human activity on the planet. I work with underrepresented, international artists to create 100% ocean-friendly and sustainable artworks, showing them how to "green" their studio art practice.

2) Science has a communication problem, which beautiful and thought-provoking art can solve. Most people do not understand life underwater. It’s a mystery even on the shoreline, forget the uncharted depths. With contemporary art, we engage humans’ natural curiosity with mesmerizing, thought-provoking sculptures. I will install underwater cameras with the sculptures so that anyone can view the ocean taking over the artworks from around world. I employ art as a catalyst for becoming familiar with under-known and essential sea life.

3) We need more corals and oysters to restore ocean health ASAP while we create new global ocean-friendly habits. At Oracabessa Bay Fish Sanctuary, Coral Projects creates needed surfaces to expand the growth of coral reefs destroyed by explosive fishing and over-fishing.

Current underwater artworks are using environmentally damaging materials and methods, like large concrete forms, or are not challenging the mind with art’s full mind-bending potential. There are zero museum quality curated exhibitions underwater currently. Instead we have individuals making their own works or science-based groups making expected forms, like mermaids and oversized sea turtles. We can do so much more with the power of creative and engaging thought that contemporary artists apply to their daily art practices. Additionally, science-groups are not properly paying artists. Artist is perhaps the only occupation where there is not wage. We are not paid when some looks at our work, like musicians or actors. Visual arts are the least funded art form and yet the visual cortex is the region of the brain that contributes directly to consciousness. What we see changes our brain and our perception of the world immediately. Lastly, white male artists make up 87% of major museum art collections and they have made most of the underwater artworks currently in existence.

Coral Projects ups the game on all fronts! We create stimulating, thought-provoking artworks under a curatorial theme made in local communities with sustainable, eco-friendly materials and methods with underrepresented artists.

A fellow BLM activist I work with said, “The job of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”

During Coral Projects: Everglades Art Lab as UNTITLED, Art Fair's Special Project, I joyfully witness countless visitors turn the corner to light up as they gazed upon our video presentation of our eco-artworks created that week in a forest of native South Florida plants. I invited 4 others artists to create temporary, site-specific, eco-friendly artworks in Florida’s Everglades guided by Miccosukee tribe Reverend Houston Cypress. The artworks left either a neutral or positive footprint on the environment. My piece titled Veil was a 6-foot woven form symbolizing the fictitious separation of humanity from nature. I collected fallen plant debris in the Everglades and launched the piece like a raft into the Turner River to become fish food and plant nutrients.

At SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2019 Coral Projects showed sketches and maquettes for underwater eco-artworks. Visitors hugged me with thanks, relieved that artists are thinking about how to work sustainably and contribute to solving the climate crisis. People literally wept. My favorite viewers are the children, for they understand immediately the potential of an ocean full of eco-friendly and visually captivating artworks.