In the beginning there were eight. A small group of students, seeking an expressive, cathartic response to the Dec. 6 campus shooting, coalesced around an elegant idea proposed by a student in a Japanese studies class: origami cranes. In a tradition known as senbazuru, people string together 1,000 folded-paper cranes — usually as a gesture of peace, a prayer for healing, or in memory of the departed. 

When those eight students posted about the senbazuru idea on the messaging app Discord, they quickly learned they weren’t the only ones in need of a communal remembrance. “Within three days, more than 200 people signed up on Discord,” says Chris Kyle Aguilar, a recent psychology graduate who is still taking Japanese classes on campus and one of five leaders who emerged for the project.

The origami cranes subsequently crafted by the UNLV community are now part of a multifaceted effort to honor the teaching legacies of the three professors killed — Patricia Navarro Velez and Jerry Cha-Jan Chang of the Lee Business School, and Naoko Takemaru of World Languages and Cultures — as well as economics professor Daraboth “Bot” Rith, who was seriously injured but has since returned to teaching classes at UNLV. 

This week, the senbazuru project will be installed in the courtyard of Beam Hall, just past six new murals created by faculty and student artists for the entrance of the building. The Faculty Senate’s Memorial Committee also is continuing its work to develop a permanent healing garden. And, at the Dec. 6 Remembrance and Reflection event on Friday, English department professor Claudia Keelan, a nationally recognized poet, will read a new work she has composed for the moment.

The community-driven origin of these efforts is notable, says Honors College professor Bryan Blankfield, co-chair of the memorial committee. Of the crane design in particular, he says, “It’s brilliant for a lot of reasons, the most important being that it was something that was initiated by the students and completely run by them. Our students engaged in the type of leadership and care for their community that we hope to foster here at UNLV.” 

Of Cranes and Murals: Memorials for the Present Experience 

At first, the students’ goal was to create 1,000 cranes to honor Takemaru, their Japanese studies professor. That scaled up immediately during the first get-together, held in Chinatown’s 201 Plaza a few days after the shooting. 

“We pretty consistently had 50 people in and out across a couple of hours,” Aguilar says of that initial gathering. 

To keep the project flowing, students organized themselves into teams handling various tasks, such as project management, supplies, venues, and social media.

Four subsequent fold-a-thons were convened in two locations: the Discovery Children’s Museum in downtown Las Vegas and the Honors College student lounge. Students too busy or group-averse to attend the gatherings dropped off homemade cranes at Savor Coffee. 

The result: a lot of cranes. By early January, organizers had collected more than 4,000 — enough to honor each of the four UNLV victims. They’ll be displayed in cases fabricated by Jackson Wolfe of the Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering.

If you’re imagining 4,000 uniform, white-paper birds, you’ll need to update that mental image. Students chose and folded their own paper, of every conceivable type, color, and emotional resonance. “Every now and then you’ll see someone’s homework from one of the professor’s classes or a textbook page,” Aguilar says. 

Together the vast flock of cranes is a riot of hues, sizes, and folding skills — appropriate for a campus that prides itself on student diversity. In the finished exhibit cases, red cranes will spell out “UNLV” with multicolored versions serving as the backdrop behind the letters.

There was more to those early gatherings than figuring out how to tuck paper into credible bird shapes. (“At first I could not fold a crane at all,” Aguliar says with a laugh. “Mine were all crumply. I could probably do it blindfolded now.”) For many participants, it was their first chance to openly reckon with the loss, fear, and vulnerability provoked by the shooting. Many talked it out; others silently processed their feelings in the comforting presence of strangers doing the same. 

“Something about making cranes is a bit therapeutic,” Aguilar says. “Whether or not you’re talking, you still feel joined together.”

An enhanced sense of connection is likewise the purpose of installations like this, says Blankfield, who taught a class titled “The Art of Public Memory: Past, Present, and Future” last spring. A public-art memorial cues your individual response to the subject, but locates it within a larger shared context. “This is giving us an opportunity to heal together, be one together,” Blankfield says.

While any public memorial must address a variety of audiences — in this case ranging from victims and their families to the wider Las Vegas Valley for which UNLV is a vital institution — the most pressing concern is naturally the campus community. Thus, the murals at the entrance of Beam Hall are intended to reframe what it is to walk into the building.

“Part of the hope is that this type of art will help change the environment so that [the university community] can better heal and also remember their colleagues,” Blankfield says. 

As the subtitle of Blankfield’s class (“Past, Present, and Future”) makes clear, public memory can function in different time signatures, too. Should it codify a past event? Catalyze emotions in the present? Suggest a way forward? Probably all three, in different proportions, depending on what’s being memorialized. 

Generally, though, Blankfield says a lot of the work is often done in the present. As he notes, there are plenty of memorials scattered throughout campus, although recognition of some has waned. Current students likely don't know the story behind Valerie Pida Plaza outside the Student Union, he points out. “It’s something that a lot of people sort of take for granted now. But at the moment, it was highly important.” 

Of Gardens and Poetry: Memorials for the Future

Still, it’s unlikely that the purpose of the forthcoming healing garden will fade in the foreseeable future. “Dec. 6 will always be an important day on the UNLV campus,” Blankfield says, “and the memorial gives people a specific place to congregate.”

“We all have a shared experience of that day, whether we were (on campus) or not,” says Keelan, the poet and English professor tasked with composing a poem for the one-year remembrance ceremony. 

That communal anguish will underpin her poem, which she was crafting when interviewed. “There’s something ongoing and eternal about the language of loss,” she says. “I’ll have to tap into that.”

This sort of public-occasion poem isn’t Keelan’s norm; she practices her art the way we typically imagine poets do, as an intimate negotiation between inspiration and language. The notion of being assigned to write a consequential poem sounds counterintuitive to the form itself.

But there is quite a history of public memorial poetry. Keelan cites a couple of classics as her models: “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as well as Walt Whitman’s soaring elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”. 

While this won’t be Keelan’s first public work marking a university milestone — she penned “To Begin” for the COVID-delayed 2020 commencement — memorializing a tragedy like Dec. 6 is a trickier responsibility.

“What kind of language do I have to forge to say, ‘We’re still here; let’s go on’?” she wonders. “To mourn, remember, and encourage onwardness?” The poem’s syntax and its musicality — the real secret to a poem’s success, she says — have to meet the gravity of the occasion, to be stirring without becoming mawkish. Bad elegies, she says, actually reduce the subject. Good ones nudge us all toward higher ground.

“A poem of this nature can express the inexpressible sorrow we feel and also be an urge toward action, both individually and as a society,” Keelan says. “That’s definitely what a poem of this kind has to do.

"Whitman loved America, but, boy, he held us responsible for how good or bad this country became.”

Those involved in the memorial process can at least take solace in having worked to bring forth something good to a community desperate to heal from so much misery.

While fellow student leaders focused on iterating the design, Aguilar found himself handling logistics to see the paper cranes project through to installation. “I’m not an artist,” he says. And yet, he became part of artistic creation. 

“I got to see how a community that was hurting was able to come together to combine all their gifts, talents, resources, and personalities into one physical object that expresses love and remembrance,” Aguilar says. “That art can bring people together is something I learned.”