Artist-in-Residence

Kevin Box

October 1 - 31, 2026

Paper is not supposed to last. Bronze is not supposed to fold. Kevin Box has spent two decades proving both wrong.

His sculptures begin as a single sheet, creased by hand, then cast in bronze, aluminium and steel so the fold outlives the paper that made it. It took two years in a Texas foundry to work out how to cast paper at all, and seven more to get it right. In 2014 he and the origami masters Robert J. Lang, Michael G. LaFosse and Beth Johnson sent that work out into public gardens as ORIGAMI IN THE GARDEN, which has since travelled to more than twenty of them. Last year New Mexico gave him the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the state’s highest.

He is here all month, with monumental work arriving on the grounds and terraces in late October alongside AERENA Galleries and Gardens. And on one Saturday afternoon in the Maker, he will teach you to fold by hand.

Kevin Box works out of a studio and sculpture garden south of Santa Fe, where he and his wife Jennifer have built a place for the work to be seen outdoors, at scale, in weather. He came to it sideways: a scholarship in graphic design at the School of Visual Arts, three weeks in Greece on an art-history grant, and the realisation that everything he was designing was headed for a landfill while the antiquities were still being argued about. He changed his major to sculpture and never went back.

What followed was a decade in foundries learning to cast, and then a long argument with a single material. Paper folds and paper perishes. Box wanted the crease without the fragility, so he taught himself to cast handmade paper into bronze, then into aluminium and stainless steel. The results read as weightless and weigh a great deal. Through October his work is in residence here, and the sculpture arriving on the grounds in the final week of the month is the largest of it.

Dates: October 1 – 31, 2026