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“Origami in the Garden,” a traveling exhibition of large-scale, origami-inspired metal sculptures begun in 2014 by the husband-and-wife team of Kevin Box (BFA 1999 Fine Arts) and Jennifer Box, is having a busy few years. 

After stops at four venues in 2021, the show popped up in May 2022 at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, where it was on view through the summer, and the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia, where it ran until November of last year. 

Box says his initial inspiration for his interest in origami started at SVA in the late 90s, during his years studying under Alice Aycock. “Alice introduced me to public art and the idea that I could possibly make a decent living at it,” he remarked. “I loved the idea of art in public places rather than in museums and galleries.”

From there, Box went to Atlanta and studied sculpture under Noel Szychowski at the Savannah, Georgia, branch of the College that existed in the mid to late 1990s. Szychowski was a paper maker by profession, and her guidance of sculpture and paper would eventually pave the way for what would evolve into the Box’s giant-sized origami sculptures. “We made lots of paper in her studio and were always challenged to make it interesting in a sculptural way,” he noted.

Box went to work in a foundry in Austin, Texas, where he struggled with the idea of sculpting with bronze and clay and instead pivoted to the idea of life-casting objects. His mother was an archivist and introduced him to the concept of archival paper and preservation. “I thought if I could make a paper original and then cast it into bronze, I would be creating the most archival paper in the world.”

Ironically, the idea of creating sculptured origami didn’t interest him, and he rejected the comparison initially. In Austin, everyone delighted in the work but constantly brought up the fact that it reminded them of origami. “I really had never thought of it and initially rejected this comparison. People kept giving me little folded paper birds, flowers and things they thought were wonderful. I thought they were childish compared to what I was doing.”

Eventually, he embraced the notion and it unlocked everything for him, beginning with learning to make a folded origami crane. ”I had taken a shamanism course at SVA [in New York] and studied the overlapping archetypes that permeated culture, religion and art history and this rang true to me. So I folded this bird and saw some potential but was unsatisfied until I deconstructed and unfolded it to discover that inside the crane was a beautiful star mandala that looked just like the other work I had been developing. This ‘aha!’ moment led me to embrace an often overlooked and underestimated technique that had enormous potential to be sculptural and allegorical. That was the genesis of it all.”

Eventually, origami blossomed and grew into the massive sculptures Box makes today. Additionally, it organically dovetailed with Box’s initial interest in public art and led to a bigger audience than he could have imagined. 

On a hunch that botanical gardens would be interested, the Boxes created “Origami in the Garden” as a traveling exhibition with no clients, no prospects, but a strong belief in the power of public art.

“Botanical gardens are outdoor museums, and because they don’t collect, they have the space and spectacular gardens to display in,” he explained. “And it has been a perfect fit ever since 2014 when we launched our first show in the Santa Fe Botanical Garden. We have exhibited in over 15 gardens since, with over two million visitors. The shows have impacted our gallery sales around the country and reached out to so many more people than public art ever has.”

This year, “Origami in the Garden” moves on to the Huntsville Botanical Garden in Alabama and the Las Cruces Museums in New Mexico. In the summer, the exhibit will be featured at the Fort Worth Botanical Garden. On top of all that, the Boxes still do public artworks, and this year they are building a series of three origami “Iron Horses” out of corten steel for the city of Dublin, California.

The couple also occasionally welcomes visitors to their three-acre Turquoise Trail Sculpture Garden in Los Cerrillos, New Mexico. For more information, visit origamiinthegarden.com. 

A version of this article appears in the fall/winter 2022 Visual Arts Journal.