During an artist opening reception on July 26, 2025, for San Francisco artist Lilli Lanier at Cafe Alma, 888 Innes St. in Bay View-Hunters Point, Lanier showed a series of portraits of well-known celebrities as well as her grandmother Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), who now has a retrospective at SFMOMA.
Lanier’s art show runs through Sept. 1, 2025.
Here, Lanier stands in front of a portrait she made of her grandmother, Asawa. Asawa was the legendary Japanese-American artist who crafted wire sculptures in her Noe Valley home studio. Lanier’s portrait is based on a photograph of Asawa by groundbreaking Bay Area photographer Imogen Cunningham.
A closer look at the Asawa portrait shows a fraction of the folded paper squares Lanier used to make the art. For the portrait, Lanier folded more than 10,000 pieces of origami in 20 different shades of color.
“Grandma Ruth taught me the origami fold when I was a kid,” Lanier recalls at the show. The Asawa portrait was just one of 10 origami portraits she is showing at the cafe.
The origami portraits are all of famous people, like basketball great Stephen Curry, iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
Lanier makes portraits of people who speak to her own values, like building community. Each portrait is a challenge for the artist to break down an image to its simplest elements and then build it up with colors, shapes, and lines.
In her artist statement, Lanier says, “The end result is a design inspired by everyday life.”
Lanier’s “Origami la Virgen de Guadalupe” is made up of 20,000 pieces, all hand-cut and folded. Lanier assembled “la Virgen” just this year, along with a unique black-and-white origami portrait of a young Grandmother Ruth.
On the black-and-white work, “I really enjoyed making this one,” Lanier wrote in a January 2025 Instagram post.
Deep into the artist reception, guests remained engaged with Lanier’s portraits. Below, Victor Young, Sr., discusses the Asawa portrait of 15,000 pieces with his daughter, Silvia Yuen. The Asawa portrait signature piece is the featured portrait of the show.
Reminds me of paint by numbers but with origami paper.
Thanks Jay! Wonderful article on an amazing artist following in her grandmother’s footsteps! 20,000 pieces of folded origami! Unbelievable! Thanks for highlighting such a unique talent! Can’t wait to see Lilli ‘s portraits in person!
Unfortunately we consider whether Rbg is contending for a leaderboard position in the category “US gerontocracy’s greatest monsters”