Giant Origami Takes Flight at McKee This Weekend
- Vero Minute
- Jan 12
- 2 min read
Updated: Jan 16
If you caught our Monday Minute last week, you know McKee Botanical Garden just threw quite the party to launch its centennial.
Now, beginning this Saturday, January 17 through May 24, they're landing another monumental event: think Chihuly-scale spectacle, but instead of molten glass, it’s the ancient art of paper folding translated into metal.
Florigami in the Garden brings Jennifer and Kevin Box’s large-scale outdoor sculptures to Florida for the first time, and McKee is only the third garden in the country to stage the exhibition at this scale. The installation reimagines the ancient art of Japanese paper folding for the 21st century, with towering metal butterflies, kinetic birds, grazing deer, and blooming flowers that move with the breeze and celebrate the garden's pollinators.
Chihuly’s great trick is taking something fragile and decorative—glass—and making it architectural, immersive, and impossible to ignore. Florigami does the same but with origami, which began as a luxury art tied to ritual when paper was precious, then slowly evolved into a global design language that now shows up in contemporary art, fashion, and even engineering.
Created in collaboration with origami masters Te Jui Fu, Robert J. Lang, Michael G. LaFosse, and Beth Johnson, the sculptures invite you to pause, look closer, and consider art as a language of patience and possibility.
This weekend layers on the live charge:
Fushu Daiko’s drums ricochet through the garden at 11:00 am, 12:00 pm, and 2:00 pm Saturday, while origami workshops, a family scavenger hunt, and a short NASA film tracing how folding principles shape spacecraft design turn the grounds into a kind of open-air cultural salon.
Kevin Box leads a 10:15 am (space is limited) tour on opening day, giving visitors the rare pleasure of hearing the story behind the sculptures from the artist himself.
Florigami in the Garden is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10:00 am to 5:00 pm (last entry 4:00 pm), and Sundays noon to 5:00 pm. Full details here.
