World Renowned Origami Artists to Speak at Lafayette
In conjunction with Crease, Fold & Bend, an origami exhibition that runs until the end of the month at Lafayette College, three of the world’s most extreme paper folding artists will speak about their work on Monday, Oct. 7 and Tuesday, Oct. 8 in the Williams Center for the Arts, 317 Hamilton St.
Father and son Martin and Erik Demaine will present “Folding Paper: Visual Art Meets Mathematics” at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 7 in Lafayette College’s Williams Center for the Arts theater.
Their lecture will be followed on Tuesday, Oct. 8 with an artist’s talk by Peruvian-Japanese installation and video artist Carlos Runcie-Tanaka at 12:15 p.m. and again at 7 p.m. in room 108 of the Williams Center for the Arts.
The talks are free and open to the public.
About 10 years ago, scientists, mathematicians, engineers and artists began pushing the boundaries of origami beyond tin foil swans and paper airplanes and creating folded models of epic imagination; the Statue of Liberty, cicadas with wings, a cuckoo clock, Jimmy Carter. But not all origami is fanciful. The practice is also being used in the development of airbags for cars, collapsible medical stents and the design of space telescopes.
The Williams Center Gallery exhibit of Crease, Fold & Bend, which runs until Oct. 27, includes a sea-worthy kayak, folded insects and animals, a shelter which can be easily transported and deployed where temporary housing is required, consumer products, and a “curved creased sculpture” by the Demaines that contains text from Graham Green’s story “The Destructors.”
Erik Demaine is a MacArthur Fellow and Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. He is also a member of the Theory of Computation Group and the Algorithms Group at CSAIL—Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory—at MIT. Several of his curved origami sculptures are housed in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.
His father, Martin Demaine, is the Angelika and Barton Weller Artist in Residence in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a technical instructor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering Glass Lab, and a member of the Theory of Computation Group at CSAIL.
Runcie-Tanaka is is one of Peru’s most important artists and has represented Peru at international biennials including the 4th and 5th Havana Biennial, the 49th Venice Biennale, the 8th Cuenca Biennial and the 26th São Paulo Biennial.
His installation of 36 folded white crabs titled, Cloud, is part of the Lafayette exhibit. It symbolizes migration, displacement, cultural identity and adaption, and represents the journeys of Runcie-Tanaka’s two grandfathers who immigrated to Peru in the 1920s.
Curators of the exhibit are New York City artist Kathy Bruce and Michiko Okaya, director of Lafayette Art Galleries.
The Crease, Fold & Bend exhibit is funded by a grant Lafayette College received from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to infuse art into the curriculum.
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Additional images are available upon request.
Kathleen Parrish
Associate Director of Media Relations
Lafayette College
Communications Division
Easton, PA 18042
parrishk@lafayette.edu