Artist Layla Love Joins the World Foundation for Peace and Sustainability to Create Underwater Sculpture Gardens

 Reef Revival Sculpture Design by Layla Love
 

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST October 18, 2024

  In the shadow of the ecological disaster in which we live, there is hope. The World Foundation of Peace and Sustainability (WFPS), which was recently founded by an environmentalist with vision, Sandeep J. Shah, an Indian entrepreneur, is unquestionably the most ambitious endeavor in global sustainability ever. Working with Shah is Layla Love, the mixed-media artist and photojournalist, who is Creative Director of Reef Revival , a project of Global Coralition, an organisation set up to reverse and hopefully replace the fifty percent of the coral the world has lost since 1950. They will be working directly with artists to get out the increasingly urgent messaging.

  Layla Love first laid eyes on a coral reef when the American photographer spent a year in Australia in her twenties. “The coral was completely bleached out,” she says. “It was white and dead. I saw more coral when diving in Fiji, an island country between Australia and New Zealand. “All the coral was bright, it was beautiful,” she says. The contrast became an embed.

  Love, an art photographer, currently showing with Annie Leibovitz at the Ilon Gallery, first got attention for Rise,  a show about human trafficking, which she curated in a New York gallery, about human trafficking, and for the events she organized at her own Chelsea gallery, likewise called Rise, to keep the spotlight on that same dark subject.

 The darkness would sometimes lift. In 2015, Love was traveling with a woman collector who had commissioned her to photograph the most beautiful places in the world. “We went around the world in 40 days,” she says. “Every continent, except the Arctic.”

One targeted location was a group of five hundred underwater sculptures by Jason deCaires Taylor in Cancun, Mexico. Love dived in for a look, was impressed and got permission to do an installation. “I was able to find one with an opening in the back,” she said. She inserted an oxygen tank. “So it was like the statue was breathing,” she says. “Bubbles were coming out of the mouth. That was how I began my love affair with underwater sculptures.”

  There was another fruitful connection. The five hundred sculptures had been designed to work with the coral reefs where they were to be put. This was Love’s first experience of coral as a work environment. It happened that she had given the artist David Block a show at Rise, and in 2018 she met David’s brother and his wife, Kyle Block and Angeline Chen, the founders of Global Coralition.

The Tallest Underwater Sculpture in the World by Global Coralition

   Since 1950, the world has lost well over fifty percent of its coral, and Global Coralition is dedicated to creating underwater sculpture gardens to propagate coral in fifty key locations. Their online text promises that Art Awakens Us to Earth’s Majesty. “I helped with designs for some potential underwater sculptures,” Love says.

Layla Love joined the Coralition team and then, another meeting at a Rise opening enters the narrative. It was at an event there that Love met Sandeep Shah, an Indian entrepreneur, and the founder of WFPS, the World Foundation for Peace and Sustainability & House of Sandy.

Layla Love Creative Director of Reef Revival
 

   Love and Sandy Shah began to talk about the Coralition’s Reef Revival project a year ago. WFPS is now getting all the strategic partners together and is planning to make art and artists a central part of the project, seeing this as an intelligent way of getting out the increasingly urgent messaging to our sleepwalking culture. But not just messaging about coral

  Sandy Shah discussed the process with me over a telephonic call. He began by noting that his foundation had been born of the covid pandemic. “During covid, a lot of friends were reaching out to me to help them on vaccines, medication and funding,” he said. This he did, in a series of unusually generous acts which led recipients to invite him as an executive board member on many global boards. It further led the group to agree to work together on some worthwhile projects.

Sandeep (Sandy) J. Shah Founder of World Foundation of Peace and Sustainability
 

No problem. It’s hardly news that the world is in perilously bad shape. “It's like we are bleeding so much, and we are just putting on Band-aids,” Sandy Shah said.   

  “Ecological biodiversity is threatened. Food, water, air, shelter, everything,” he said. “We want to involve every global citizen in the change making process, to enable and empower them to be a participant in the narrative of sustainability. And that's how the whole thing came about. So, for one and a half years I've been going around the world and getting all the global stakeholders together, and, by God's blessing and good friends wishes, we have managed to do that.” His board, says Shah, is a muscular one, being comprised of “global leaders who are running multibillion dollar conglomerates, along with global institutional & foundation partners.” He added, “And now we are getting to the operating zone. We are going to get operational soon”.

   What had drawn Sandy Shah specifically to Love’s Reef Revival project? He had liked Love’s earlier projects. As to the Reef Revival project, he sees the ocean as the very core of a sustainable ecosystem. “Having the marine life, the corals living, I liked the passion and the purity of the intent of Layla for that,” he said.

  “We need to be grateful for what the planet, Mother Nature, has blessed us with in every aspect, and we need to be responsible for other species, our generation and future generations. That is the basic premise which prompted me to get into that space. And I never thought in my life that it would go to this level.”

  I said I was interested in the heft he was giving the arts in the project. “A human being understands narratives through stories,” Shah said. “If you just tell people to ban plastic or save water, it has a limited appeal. Preaching to people is easy, and it doesn't register. But if you use the richness of art and the vibrancy of the platform, and give people a sense of belonging to the cause, things will change dramatically. Because this will only succeed if people support it.”

  I observed to Shah that human beings have always been good at not contemplating their own deaths, this being originally a survival mechanism, but no longer, as we mostly ignore the lethal threats to the planet. In my youth, I observed, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had still been vivid historic memories and that particular existential threat to life on earth generated the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). This had been widely supported by artists, writers and performers, which had been hugely effective in generating popular awareness. I noted also that the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi had been fundamental to CND.

Sculpture by Jason deCaines Taylor, Breath Installation by Layla Love
 

   Sandy Shah lit up. “So my inspiration is Mahatma Gandhi in this,” he said. “The freedom fighters, including Mahatma Gandhi, were fighting for freedom for India. Eventually, we got the freedom when the people joined the movement. The peoples’ support is critical. All Mahatma Gandhi did was start walking instead of protesting. He didn't say a word and people started joining his movement, and that became one of the biggest movements. Similarly Martin Luther King ‘I have a dream’ & John Lennon’s, Earth day.”

  Sustainable human life on an entire planet is a bigger, but more necessary goal. “Because we have no choice,” Shah says. “So it’s not just climate change, global warming. Well, of course, it is. But it’s also environmental degradation. We have so degraded our environment now that I don’t know whether we can reverse it. But at least we can defer it. It is imperative for the world to progress in a sustainable way.”

  So in a few months time, WFPS will be going public. And the Global Coralition?

   “In 2025, Global Coralition will be doing three things,” said Layla Love. “They’ll be working on sculptures in Indonesia and Mexico.” She, Angeline Chen and Kyle Block will work on the designs for these underwater pieces, and they will bring in the indigenous artists and leaders.

   And the Coral Reef project?
   “They’ll be establishing a unique coral farm in the Dominican Republic and they are working with the locals there to do the coral farming,” Love says. “Coral farming makes the coral grow stronger, faster and more heat resistant. And they’ll grow this small baby coral so that it will turn into a big coral reef.” Yes, the coral reef. WM