In an installation at Meta Open Arts’ Miami office to mark World Oceans Day on June 8, Morel Doucet ’13 (Ceramics BFA) addresses themes of climate change in his work The Ocean Dances Over Sun-Buttered Mountains.

Founded by Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual reality company, Meta, Open Arts was created to empower communities through creativity. Meta Open Arts routinely collaborates with artists and designers around the world to offer new ways of thinking, and the connection between the organization and Doucet — a Miami-based artist originally from Haiti — was no coincidence. Doucet uses his work to catalog a powerful record of environmental decay at the intersection of economic inequity, the commodification of industry, and race; and his work for Meta Open Arts is a visual allegory that confronts Miami’s climate crisis using ceramic porcelain forms that the artist hand built and slip cast to mimic coral species and their fragility.

Doucet’s work can currently be seen at the 59th Venice Biennale in The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined. On view through November 2, 2022 at the European Cultural Centre. In addition, Doucet is a committed arts educator and is a frequent visiting artist at MICA, where he works with and mentors students taking in the Ceramics Department.