This visit to the Academy of Natural Sciences (ANS) was the second in two weeks for me. I was there a couple weeks ago to attend a GEOfest lecture about traveling around Europe. Before the lecture, I had some time to browse the museum, but I was mostly uninterested. Having seen the dioramas of (what I thought were) taxidermy animals many times before, I was mostly trying to kill time. However, this class visit helped me understand the value of these dioramas and the important stories they tell about connecting the past to the present and the connection of art and science.
The original main attraction of ANS is the life size dioramas depicting a diversity of animals and their natural habitats. These exhibits were high tech in their day – the discovery channel of the 1930s – and yet are still fascinating today. Every detail was hand-crafted as accurately from as possible, from strectching animal skin over casts to individual leaves, and is based off of photographs. The dioramas’ complete history may not be understood by a public visitor and therefore may be overlooked. However, the new exhibit in development will help the public understand the extent of manual labor and research that was put into the making of these exhibits in the 1930s. As Michelle Henning states, new media should “modernize, popularize, and increase the efficiency” of “old-fashioned” institutions (302). Visitors will be able to touch samples of hand crafted trees and boulders while reading about how the dioramas were made. However, this new exhibit is expensive, costing $50,000. For perspective, this amount is one year’s earnings for the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Weschler). Through hands on exhibits and stories of the development, visitors will develop a personal connection to the ANS that they may otherwise lack with undeveloped science museums like the Wagner.
It corresponds with the “Art of Science” gallery which also blurs the line between science and art by showcasing objects through different mediums. ANS competes with their more ostentatious neighbor the Franklin Institute. This new exhibit will be an improvement on their outdated ‘video room;’ I only hope it adds to the dioramas rather than becoming the focus of attention, “brighter and more full of promise than any of the other exhibits” (Smith 544). Some may be reluctant to accept the incorporation of media into a traditional institution such as ANS and fear over-commercialization (Henning 302). However, from the description of “Inside the Diorama,” the ANS organizers are tastefully incorporating modern, hands-on exhibits to increase visitor engagement and to stay in contention with other museums improvising to survive in the age of technology (Chung, Wilkening, and Johnstone 43).
