Allison Redfoot, assistant director and education coordinator at the Earl Burns Miller Japanese Garden, said she remembers when origami was a small presence in the garden, occupying only one table at the annual Chrysanthemum Festival.
After visitors repeatedly asked for more, that single table expanded into its own 40-booth origami festival at Cal State Long Beach’s Japanese garden.
The annual origami festival attracts paper-folding enthusiasts from the campus and the community by providing them with the opportunity to take part in the ancient art form at the garden.
Origami demonstrators, such as Carol Stevens – who wore a shirt that read, “I fold under pressure” – taught participants at the event how to create cranes, turtles, strawberries and many more folds from paper alone.
More than 1,000 people attended the festival, Redfoot said. The average age of visitors was 20, according to curator of the Japanese garden, Vergil Hettick.
“I think it’s very unique in that anyone from two to 92 can enjoy this event,” Megan Ono, a junior Asian and Asian American studies and communications major at CSUlB, said.
Redfoot said she believed the festival was marvelous because origami is not specific to one ethnicity or race.
“There’s no culture that’s not represented in the origami culture [through various folds],” Redfoot said.
The festival began more than 15 years ago with former CSULB student Robert Earl, according to Redfoot. Earl was a volunteer at the Japanese garden and helped demonstrate origami he had learned from his math tutor.
Earl’s tutor taught him origami at the end of each tutoring session to reinforce mathematical concepts, Redfoot said.
Meher McArthur, a curator of an origami exhibition in Los Angeles, said paper folding has become a science. According to McArthur, scientists and mathematicians utilize the concepts of folds to develop new technologies within their fields.
McArthur said scientists conceptualize how proteins fold in order to better understand how diseases progress, doctors create origami tubes that expand inside the body to open arteries and engineers use origami to better compact air bags within vehicles.
Some visitors at the event, like senior criminalist in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Yukie Partos, said she enjoyed the meditative quality of paper-folding, her favorite pastime.
The theme of this year’s festival was reusable resources, co-sponsored by the Arts Council for Long Beach. An exhibition at the event allowed spectators to see how old manila folders, glue made from rice and water and old magazine pages could transform into art.
“It’s amazing how a square piece of paper can do so many things,” Yoko Pusavat, a CSULB emerita professor, said. “… Something that’s one dimension – a flat sheet can have infinite possibilities.”
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