Please join Public Programs in the Frances Loeb Library and Online.

The ReefLine’s Founder and Artistic Director, Ximena Caminos, invites you to explore “marine acupuncture,” an innovative practice combining high art and deep science to target critical pressure points within our oceans.

The ReefLine will be a 7-mile underwater public sculpture park, snorkel trail, and hybrid reef off Miami Beach’s shoreline, fostering environmental awareness through art and action-driven conservation. Conceived by cultural place-maker Ximena Caminos and developed by the BlueLab Preservation Society, the ReefLine nonprofit team collaborates with architecture firm OMA as well as marine biologists, researchers, architects, and coastal engineers to design the master plan. Caminos’ lecture, followed by a conversation with Pedro Alonzo and Charles Waldheim, highlights how this pioneering approach uses human ingenuity to ignite ecological processes that help the reef regenerate. The ReefLine’s cross-disciplinary methodology offers a compelling example of how collaboration can help solve some of the most pressing environmental challenges of our time.

This event is supported by the Melissa Kaish and Jonathan Dorfman Makers Fund.

SPEAKER

Ximena Caminos is a cultural entrepreneur and place-maker, celebrated for her unwavering commitment to public art. She is the President of BlueLab Preservation Society, CCO of HoneyLab Creative, and Founder of The ReefLine. Caminos has pioneered new ways to engage with contemporary art, emphasizing its role in community-building, urban development, climate change, and ocean conservation. She has played a pivotal role in creating large-scale cultural districts across North and South America.

Caminos served as Artistic Visionary Planner for The Underline, the largest public art project in the US, and former Chair of Faena Art. She also served as Executive Creative Director and partner in Faena Group, Chief Curator at the Faena Arts Center in Buenos Aires, and founded the Faena Prize for the Arts.

Caminos is a member of the New Museum Leadership Council, founding member of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Latin American Circle, and Advisor to Art Basel Cities. She is an XPrize Ambassador and a recipient of the Knight Foundation’s Arts Challenge Award and the Arts Champion Award.

Pedro Alonzo is an independent curator who has served as adjunct curator at Dallas Contemporary, the ICA Boston, and the Institute of Visual Arts at the University of Wisconsin. He is currently a Lecturer in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he teaches a course on curating in public spaces. Alonzo specializes in exhibitions that transcend the museum walls. In 2017, he collaborated with JR on an installation at the U.S.-Mexico border and, in 2022, on Amnesia Atómica with Pedro Reyes in Times Square. He has also developed singular public art projects with Alicja Kwade, Claudia Comte, Doug Aitken, Sam Durant, Shepard Fairey, Oscar Tuazon, and Jean-Marie Appriou. In 2024, Alonzo was part of the curatorial team for the Noor Riyadh Festival in Saudi Arabia. He is currently the artistic director for the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial, scheduled for 2025. In November 2024, he produced and curated Midnight Zone, a large-scale video installation and sculptural lighthouse lens by Julian Charrière in Los Cabos, Mexico, addressing the dangers of deep-sea mining.

Charles Waldheim is the John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture, Director of the Office for Urbanization, and Co-Director of the Master in Design Studies program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is an American-Canadian architect and urbanist. Waldheim’s research examines the relations between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. He has authored and edited numerous books on these subjects, and his writing has been published and translated internationally. Waldheim is the recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Study Centre of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Cullinan Chair at Rice University, and the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan.