NEW YORK (AP) – A popular Christmas tree tradition is returning to Manhattan for the holiday season next week. No, that’s not the spruce tree towering over Rockefeller Center. Lights up in early December.
Relatively small origami holiday trees have been a crowd-pleaser for decades. American Museum of Natural History It opens to the public on Monday. The colorful and richly decorated 4-meter (13-foot) tree is adorned with thousands of hand-folded paper ornaments created by origami artists from around the world.
This year’s tree was inspired by the museum’s new exhibit, “Impact: The End of the Age of Dinosaurs.” asteroid impact About 66 million years ago, life on Earth was re-formed.
Taro Kawasaki, co-designer of the tree, said the tree’s theme is “new beginnings,” a nod to the new post-war world. Mass extinction.
A golden asteroid is attached to the top of this artificial tree, located just outside the museum’s Central Park west entrance.
The branches and limbs are filled with origami creations depicting various animals and insects, including foxes, cranes, turtles, bats, sharks, elephants, giraffes, and monkeys. Popular dinosaurs such as Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus are also featured on folded paper art pieces.
“We wanted to focus less on the extinction of the dinosaurs and more on the new life they gave rise to, the expansion and evolution of mammals that eventually led to humans,” Kawasaki explained during a recent visit.
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Origami trees have been a highlight of the museum’s holiday season for more than 40 years.
Volunteers from all over the world are being recruited to create hundreds of new models. Intricate paper artwork is usually made from a single sheet of paper and can take days or even weeks to complete.
The new origami creations are enhanced by archival pieces kept from previous seasons, including a 40-year-old model of a pterosaur, an extinct flying reptile, that was folded as one of the museum’s first origami trees in the early 1970s.
Rosalind Joyce, the tree’s co-designer, estimates there are between 2,000 and 3,000 origami creations embedded within the tree.
“There’s a lot packed into this year,” she said. “That’s why I’m not counting.”
