“Dioramas arose in the late 1800s, largely out of a desire to return to nature following the Industrial Revolution. “These are what you might call the earliest version of virtual reality,” says Stephen Quinn, who recently retired as senior project manager and longtime diorama artist at the AMNH. The displays consist of taxidermied animals, foreground props and artfully painted panoramic backgrounds. More than just works of art, dioramas are true to science; for decades, artists and scientists went into the field to collect specimens and their surroundings and replicate them exactly as they appeared. “This sense of place and this sense of reality and a personal encounter is so strong that they are a real powerful medium for teaching science,” Quinn says.
The form peaked around the 1920s, and interest began waning after World War II. Today, dioramas are as endangered as many of the animals they portray. Since TV sets entered living rooms, and with so many subsequent technological innovations, natural history museums have agonized over what to do with their increasingly antiquated-seeming habitat dioramas. Willard Boyd, former president of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, wrote in 1999 that dioramas “are often viewed by today’s visitors as a dead zoo located in a dark tunnel.”
Museum specialists call it the “diorama dilemma,” and they’ve struggled to solve it for decades.”
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