Origami for an Interdependent World

Robert Salazar, an origami artist and wildlife activist from Santa Barbara, will speak about origami’s metamorphic nature and how harmony is readily accessible, even among the thousands of complex interdependent folds—ranging in size from a fraction of an inch to several feet in length—that might inhabit a simple sheet of paper, to create something beautiful.
 
Salazar will introduce the audience to each of his original works on exhibit, their origins, and the stories of the maritime wildlife and people they portray. 
 
“Origami is a unique art form in that anyone origami can be transformed into any other by folding alone,” said Salazar. “What’s more, an unlimited diversity of forms can be folded and they all emerge from a single uncut sheet of paper. Folded relationships cannot be cut with scissors or appended with additional sheets of paper. All the magic lies in the harmony of many interdependent folds.”
 
Robert Salazar is a Wildlife Ambassador with the World Wildlife Fund and the founder of Origami for an Interdependent World, an organization whose mission is to inspire action and raise awareness and funds for wildlife conservation through origami. He is also an origami deployable structures contractor at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he designed the origami patterns for the Starshade spacecraft, whose mission is to assist space telescopes in searching for life among planets orbiting other stars. Salazar continues at JPL, developing large origami deployable solar reflectors for redirecting solar energy to potential robotic operations in the Moon’s darkest coldest water-ice bearing regions.
 
A display of Salazar’s origami will be exhibited at the Museum indefinitely.