A rainbow-colored, 15-foot-tall steel origami crane sat in a St. Francis parking lot this week before making an 1,800-mile journey to the Nevada desert. The sculpture, built by the Milwaukee-area collective Steel Tigerlillies, spent the last year taking shape and was loaded up for transport to Burning Man on Friday.
The piece, measuring 15 by 27 feet with a kaleidoscopic, mosaic rainbow finish, is officially titled “1/1000 – A Wish for Recovery,” according to the Burning Man Project, which selected it in March as one of 75 global Honoraria Art Grant recipients funded from the organization's $1.3 million grant pool. As reported by TMJ4 News, the Steel Tigerlillies put the final pieces on the sculpture on Aug. 21 before beginning the trek to Nevada the next day.
The crane's design draws directly from the novel “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes,” about a girl diagnosed with leukemia from atomic bomb radiation after World War II, per the station's report. Lead artist Sarah Davitt said the crane represents a big wish for peace, tying the sculpture to that story.
A Real Girl's Story Behind the Steel
The novel is rooted in the real life of Sadako Sasaki, who was two years old when she survived the 1945 Hiroshima atomic bombing, according to the U.S. National Park Service. Ten years later she developed radiation-induced leukemia and folded more than 1,000 paper cranes in her hospital bed before dying at age 12 in October 1955, per the same account.
Sasaki's death inspired her classmates to launch a worldwide fundraising campaign that led to the 1958 dedication of the Children's Peace Monument in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, according to Hibakusha Stories. That monument still receives millions of folded paper cranes sent from around the world.
Building Something Bigger Than a Garage Project
Steel Tigerlillies formed around December 2022 at the Milwaukee Makerspace as a women-led sculpture group aimed at teaching welding and heavy metal fabrication, according to Milwaukee Makerspace. Davitt said the organization helps people feel comfortable building things they might normally leave to their husbands, and described the group as an inclusive art organization open to everyone, per TMJ4's report.
Davitt has worked as a Milwaukee-based multidisciplinary artist for two decades, specializing in retroreflective light installations and community art projects. She was selected in 2023 as the City of Milwaukee's inaugural Public Artist in Residence, a program that pairs local artists with municipal departments to tackle community issues; in that role she designed “The Moving City,” an art car built from a municipal 2003 Ford Ranger decorated with traffic cones to address reckless driving, according to the city's residency program records.
This is not the collective's first trip to Black Rock City. Steel Tigerlillies previously built “Ouroboros,” a mirrored steel sculpture created in collaboration with artist Bathsheba Grossman that also received a Burning Man honorarium grant and was installed in the Nevada desert in 2025.
An Interactive Piece That Changes Every Day
Once the crane arrives at Burning Man, which runs in Nevada's Black Rock Desert from August 30 to September 7 under the art theme “Axis Mundi,” attendees will be able to enter the sculpture and follow instructions to make their own smaller origami cranes. Those smaller cranes will then be hung inside the piece, changing its environment every day, and will eventually be burned in one of the festival's fires.
That burning is required by Burning Man's Leave No Trace principle, one of the event's 10 core tenets governing how a temporary city of more than 70,000 participants manages installation materials, per Event Tickets Center. Black Rock City has no municipal trash collection, meaning art collectives must plan for controlled burns or full removal of everything they bring in.
Sarah Spottswoods said the sculpture is larger than life and reflects Burning Man's dream-making spirit, according to the TMJ4 report. Davitt added that while people can appreciate art in the group's workspace, hearing someone call it cool is magical.
The Cost of Hauling Steel Across the Country
Getting a piece this size from Wisconsin to the Nevada desert is not cheap. During their 2025 trip, the Steel Tigerlillies had to raise more than $5,000 through crowdfunding just to cover heavy truck rental, fuel, and transit insurance, since honoraria grants typically cover only a portion of total build and transport expenses. The group has a fundraiser running now to support this year's travel and transportation costs.
With the sculpture now on its way west, the Steel Tigerlillies are hoping it reaches an audience far beyond the St. Francis parking lot where it was built. The piece has the potential to be seen by tens of thousands of people at Burning Man, carrying a decades-old wish for peace into the desert one folded crane at a time.
