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ST. FRANCIS, Wisconsin (WTMJ) — You’ve probably never seen a 15-foot-tall metal origami crane. Well, one is sitting in a St. Francis parking lot. It was made by a group of Milwaukee-area artists, and it’s going to the iconic festival, Burning Man.
“We can make stuff here in this space, and people can appreciate it, but there’s something magic that happens when you’re just kind of standing around doing a thing, changing a battery, and you hear somebody go, ‘That is so cool.’ I love that,” Sarah Davitt, a member of Steel Tiger Lillies, the group that made the sculpture, said.
Steel Tiger Lillies is an inclusive art organization originally formed to teach women trades like welding and heavy fabrication. Now, it’s open to everyone.
“Allowed people to feel comfortable building stuff that they normally would say, ‘You should let your husband do that,'” Davitt said.
The origami crane has a kaleidoscopic and mosaic rainbow aesthetic. Burners, people who attend Burning Man, will be able to enter it and follow instructions to make their own smaller origami cranes.
“That we will actually hang in the piece, so that you will have origami cranes kind of taking and changing the environment every day. And later, those will be burned in one of the many fires that are available at Burning Man,” Davitt said.
The design was inspired by the novel ‘Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes’, which is about a girl diagnosed with leukemia from atomic bomb radiation after World War II.
“It is a really big wish for peace,” Davitt said.
It’s also a really big moment for the artists who spent the last year creating this 15-by-27-foot sculpture. It has the potential to be seen by tens of thousands of people at Burning Man.
“It’s just larger than life, and that is what Burning Man is, making dreams come true,” Sarah Spottswoods, another member of the Steel Tiger Lillies, said.
The group has been building the sculpture since Nov. 2025. They were putting on the final pieces on Aug. 21, the day before they began transporting it to Nevada.
Steel Tiger Lillies has a fundraiser to help support travel and transportation costs.
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