The Inside-Out Diorama

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2023

The inside-out diorama

On the new Richard Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History.

Anyone who has walked through the American Museum of Natural History might have sensed something was wrong. Just go through its Hall of Gems and Minerals, or its Hall of South American Peoples, or its Hall of Pacific Peoples. At the end of each of these long rooms, which were only reached through other long rooms, you found nothing less than a dead end. In a way, the reason was by design: the master plan of this museum, founded in 1869 and first envisioned by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould in 1872, has never been fully realized. Much like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and other grand nineteenth-century American edifices, New York’s natural-history museum was laid out on a massive cross-in-square plan, which has only been partially built out over time.

Beyond merely the dead ends, what this means is that, over a century and a half after its founding, the street-facing façades and infill architecture of this museum have been created in a progression of styles that have reflected, for better and worse, the ideals of their times. The museum began on the southern side of its four-block quadrangle bordering Central Park, carved out of the street grid of the then-undeveloped Upper West Side. From 1874 to 1877, Vaux and Mould extended their pastoral vision from Central Park to break ground on the museum’s first wing in the Gothic Revival style; from then until now, this building, which was soon surrounded by future construction, has housed the museum’s Northwest Coast Hall.

An aerial view of the American Museum of Natural History’s campus. Photo: Iwan Baan.

The plan to extend this Gothic language across the four seven-hundred-and-forty-foot sides of the envisioned museum was quickly eclipsed by changing architectural taste. In 1897, a new plan emerged to complete the museum in a Romanesque Revival style. The Seventy-seventh Street façade, designed by Cady, Berg & See and constructed between 1890 and 1900, and the southwest wing, designed by Charles Volz and built between 1906 and 1908, gave the museum its fanciful red turrets and first distinctive appearance.

The need for natural light and air at one time called for four internal open courtyards located within the circulating wings, all radiating out from a domed central tower. In the twentieth century, with advances in artificial light and ventilation, these open spaces began to be modified and built in. Rather than a dome, the central building became the museum’s lecture hall, designed by Cady, Berg & See in 1900. Wings for ocean life and education filled in the southwest and southeast courtyards in 1924 and 1928. A power and service building of 1930–35 infilled the northwest courtyard. Meanwhile the art-deco Hayden Planetarium, designed by Trowbridge & Livingston, was constructed in the northeast courtyard in 1934–35. At the same time, between 1931 and 1936, the museum’s eastern façade fronting Central Park West received John Russell Pope’s Roman Revival grand vision for the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Rotunda, complete with a triumphal arch, coffered vaulted interiors, and an equestrian statue of our twenty-sixth president mounted at the center of a monumental entry plaza. Then, over half a century later, a year-2000 addition by Polshek Partnership, which replaced the Hayden with the Rose Center for Earth & Space, stayed within this original master plan while again departing in style, this time resulting in a celestial sphere (housing the new planetarium theater) suspended in an illuminated glass cube.

Despite over a century and a half, and the construction of some twenty-five buildings, the museum has still only filled out about two-thirds of its original master-plan footprint. This incompleteness has been most felt on its western side facing Columbus Avenue, where existing wings have ended abruptly, resulting in many of those back-tracking dead ends. A central building that connects these wings, on all four of the museum’s floors, has long been overdue.

The Columbus Avenue entrance to the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation. Photo: Alvaro Keding / © AMNH.

The Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, over a decade in the making and opened to the public on May 4, set out to do just that. (For more, see “Old museums, new tricks” in The New Criterion of February 2017.) Filling in a void along the museum’s western edge, the 230,000-square-foot wing creates some thirty new access points to the museum’s twenty-building complex. It also generally continues the massing of the original master plan while extending the museum’s central axis west from the Roosevelt Rotunda, resulting in a new façade that now lines up with Seventy-ninth Street.

Funded by one of New York’s great latter-day philanthropists, the Gilder Center is named for the late Republican financier who once teamed up with none other than George Soros to found the Central Park Conservancy. Among the other New York–based beneficiaries of Richard Gilder’s largesse before his death in 2020 were the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and the magazine you are now reading.

Early on the Gilder Center was designated to expand the museum’s educational mission, with additional classroom space as well as room to display more of the museum’s permanent collection of objects and scientific specimens, of which only 2–3 percent might ever be on view at any given time. Rising over three stories, these new displays, called the Louis V. Gerstner Jr. Collections Core and the Macaulay Family Foundation Collections Gallery, are among the Gilder Center’s most beneficial new additions. Behind the vitrines we can see the new rolling-stack storage shelves where some 12 percent of the museum’s collection, or four million specimens, has been, or is being, relocated. These displays, by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, reveal the breadth and depth of the museum’s holdings while also, for the first time, giving us a window onto its activities as a working scientific institution.

The development of open storage has been an undersung initiative of recent museum practice, one that in fact revives the object-based focus of the Renaissance Wunderkammer, the precursor of our nineteenth-century museums. At the Gilder Center, touch screens and detailed labels tell us much about these slices of the museum’s varied collection. In one area are displays of antique lantern slides, eastern box turtles, giant extinct mammals, wasp nests and galls, cleared and stained fish, New York rocks, Gaia astronomical data, Korean pottery, Maasai beadwork, and even a selection of Vladimir Nabokov’s butterflies. Another floor contains handmade African toys, bats, insects and spiders, parrots, astronomical instruments, amphibians, field documentation, a hadrosaur footprint, crinoid fossils, and the bones of a giant grouper. Still another houses Pueblo pottery, Maya bricks, Camarasaurus vertebrae, animal horns, drill core samples, trilobite fossils, sea-snail shells, megalodon teeth, ammonite fossils, and a captivating display of corals and echinoderms. Nearby, yet another new storage room and study center, visible through a window, now contains a sizeable percentage of the museum’s 3.1 million specimens of moths and butterflies. The one discordant note in all this is “Housewares of the Mao Era,” a display of Communist agitprop that describes the Cultural Revolution as merely a “sweeping campaign to reshape and reeducate Chinese society.” By sweeping away the death of some thirty million Chinese, the museum might satisfy ccp censors, but the appalling omission should not escape our notice.

The David S. and Ruth L. Gottesman Research Library and Learning Center at the Richard Gilder Center. Photo: Alvaro Keding / © AMNH.

A new library and reading room on the top floor, called the David S. and Ruth L. Gottesman Research Library and Learning Center, continues the spirit of open storage with walls of books and artifacts. The library is another achievement of the Gilder wing, bringing the museum’s extensive bibliographic collection out from a hidden location off of the dinosaur hall into wider and more welcoming public view. A wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves called the “Great Range” contains models of a polar bear from 1912, of a Camarasaurus from circa 1919, and of HMS Beagle from circa 2005. Also here is a crate from the museum’s Congo expedition (ca. 1909–15), a museum flag from its land exhibition of 1941, and a lunar tire prototype from 2011. Nearby, for the first time, the library has an alcove to exhibit a selection of its rare books, objects, and manuscripts, such as a 1705 edition of Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium.

One of the wing’s new permanent exhibits is the five-thousand-square-foot Susan and Peter J. Solomon Family Insectarium. The ground-floor display makes the best case for our buggy acquaintances, whether they be vectors for our diseases—by a wide margin, the mosquito has been the most lethal animal to human life—or the essential pollinators of our food supply. Here the focus is an elaborate terrarium of live leaf-cutter ants walking across ropes and bridges with their snipped loads. A floor up, the Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium relocates the museum’s live butterfly room from its digs in the Whitney Memorial Hall, with historical dioramas Pacific bird life that will now hopefully be restored and reopened, to a more permanent home.

Life’s interconnectedness is a recurring theme of the Gilder Center. A twelve-minute immersive video called “Invisible Worlds,” designed by Tamschick Media+Space with Boris Micka Associates, is a remarkable feat of interactive projection. Still, I am not sure how much insight can genuinely be gleaned from its ambient soundtrack and ASMR narration—“humans have created digital networks to extend the reach of our ideas. How many texts have you sent today?” asks a breathy female narrator. More thought-provoking are the touch-screen quizzes in the film’s entry hall, asking whether we are more closely related to mold or moss (the answer is mold, by a difference of some five hundred million years) or sea sponges or starfish (starfish, by two hundred million years).

The Invisible Worlds Immersive Experience at the Richard Gilder Center. Photo: Iwan Baan.

The Gilder Center has tucked its many exhibits and displays around a five-story entry atrium designed by Jeanne Gang that is presented as the showpiece of the project. On the building’s exterior, blocks of Milford pink granite—the very same stone used on Pope’s Roosevelt Rotunda—have been cut by computer into sedimentary wave-like patterns. On the interior, shotcrete, a spray-on concrete used primarily for tunnel construction, has been slathered and scraped onto rebar molds to form the walls and ceilings. The architect has described the forms of this space as being inspired by slot caverns, riverbank canyons, melting blocks of ice, and prehistoric cave dwellings. Its construction is presented as ecologically sensitive in every conceivable way; talk of climate change is never far from the sales pitch. The result is a cross between Antoni Gaudí and Fred Flintstone. This is not to suggest the forms are not arresting. The atrium leads onto a grand staircase by way of Castle Grayskull. Pseudo land-bridges connect the upper floors. The shotcrete surfaces, left scraped and raw, have the look of tufted wool from afar and the feel of coarse-grit sandpaper up close. The walls can catch the raking sunlight in a satisfying sculptural way. In contrast, any knee or hand that catches its sharp and crumbly surface will feel most unsatisfied. I can only imagine how this rough aggregate will age once the first cup of coffee spills down its side and gum sticks to its surface. I fear starchitects, especially those bearing eco-pablum.

The staircase in the Kenneth C. Griffin Exploration Atrium of the Richard Gilder Center. Photo: Iwan Baan.

For all of its nature-like forms, this shotcrete architecture is also the most artificial aspect of the new facility. The American Museum of Natural History is known for its historical dioramas. One way to see this design is as a diorama turned inside out, one where we are the specimens on view. It is interesting to note that shotcrete was invented by no less than the naturalist Carl Akeley, the pioneer of the museum’s historical dioramas.

But now the diorama frame is gone. So too is all of the historicized architecture, washed away in the same progressive deluge that recently toppled the Roosevelt statue from the museum’s front stairs. What results is a museum wiped down to the bone. Here is a post-apocalyptic vision where we are no longer the civilized masters of the universe but cave dwellers once again. In our self-obsessed age, perhaps it is appropriate finally to be the subject of this museum’s latest and largest diorama. Just what the five-story display says about the future of humanity is a label yet to be written. If I had my way, to borrow a line popularized by William F. Buckley Jr., I might simply suggest, Don’t immanentize the eschaton. The anthropocene will never kill us, but scientism just might.

The Way of the Masks

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2022

The way of the masks

On the newly redone Northwest Coast Hall at the American Museum of Natural History.

The museum of today dislikes the museum of yesterday. That’s clear enough as the buildings, the collections, and the curators of the past are branded suspect and even denounced by the leadership of the present. Nowhere has this been more evident than at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. For years the institution has been on an apology tour for America and its relationship to nature and history, all the while turning the museum into a vitrine of virtue-signaling politics. Artifacts from its Hall of South American Peoples, such as the shrunken heads of the Shuar Indians of Ecuador, have been effaced from view. A diorama of “Old New York” depicting trade between the Dutch settlers and Lenape tribesmen has been graffitied over with content warnings. (“The scene offers only stereotypical representations and ignores how complex and violent colonization was for Native people.”) At the same time the museum has shown increasing contempt for its visitors, who must now queue outside for an hour or longer just to pass through a phalanx of security- and covid-theater.

Early this year this progressive onslaught reached a fever pitch as the institution jackhammered up the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt from the museum’s memorial rotunda that bears his name. This work by James Earle Fraser, based on Verrocchio’s grand equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, had been an integral part of John Russell Pope’s original 1928 museum design (see “A classical illness” in The New Criterion of September 2020). I am still astonished the museum went through with this act of vandalism, which was an affront to the city, not to mention an insult to our twenty-sixth president. The museum has now deprived future generations of its own history as embodied in its art and architecture. It has also shown itself to be at the beck and call of the woke mob, when even those artifacts bolted to the pavement are no longer safe from erasure. As Ellen Futter, the museum’s director of the past three decades, has just announced her retirement, one can only hope that the censorious managerial class she represents will go the way of the dinosaurs.

Against the backdrop of our own tribal politics, the study of culture, in which the American Museum of Natural History was once an unapologetic leader, can still come as particular relief. Even as it now eats itself, the institution, in its founding mission, was an ark for the world’s traditional cultures at a moment when many of them were under threat or vanishing. At no time was this more evident than under the guidance of the anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942). Over a century ago the museum through his work preserved the customs and artifacts of the tribes of the Pacific Northwest in astonishing ways that continue to enrich us today. This preservation has been especially valuable as those tribes under Canadian jurisdiction faced a government that outlawed their rituals and destroyed their artifacts as a matter of policy for nearly a century. In 1899 Boas’s Northwest Coast Hall opened in the museum’s first wing. Today it remains the oldest exhibit on view, and in its original location. Now after a five-year renovation, the hall has reopened. The results should still remind us of the genius of Northwest Coast culture and the achievements of Boas and his colleagues in preserving it. At the same time the renovation signals troubling new directions for anthropological display.

The old Northwest Coast Hall. Photo courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

The ten nations that make up the Northwest Coast tribes—Tlingit, Haida, Nisga’a, Gitxsan, Tsimshian, Haíltzaqv, Nuxalk, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-cha-nulth, and Salish—at one time enjoyed an abundance of natural resources that allowed for the development of a richly artistic and performative culture. This abundance was celebrated through the “potlatch,” an elaborate social pageant where rank and status were conferred through the ritual sacrifice of some of these resources. As a field researcher in British Columbia, Boas did not just amass the tribal artifacts of the peoples living there. He also studied their tribal customs, in particular those around the potlatch. Working with George Hunt, an English-Tlingit guide married to a Kwakwaka’wakw native, in 1897 Boas published The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, an extensive monograph that recorded their ceremonies, songs, and language in relation to their artistic materials—in particular the transforming, animistic wooden masks of the Kwakwaka’wakw.

A map of the Northwest Coast tribes. Photo courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

The complexities of these native practices, especially the ritual destruction of resources, were used as justification by the Canadian government for banning the potlatch and subsequently confiscating and destroying their artifacts, through laws that were in effect from 1884 to 1951. While motivated by the “best practices” of the age, which sought to assimilate native populations into Canadian culture, these statutes were an injustice that proved to be catastrophic for native art and custom.

It was the great ingenuity of Boas to work around Canada’s potlatch ban and complete his research. Rather than continue his field research in Canada, he arranged for Hunt and his extended family to live for seven months in 1893 in an ethnographic display as part of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he could study the Kwakwaka’wakw outside of Canadian jurisdiction.

When Boas’s hall opened in 1899, he carried through his deep understanding of Pacific Coast cultures while respecting their tribal specificity. Thanks to his extensive field research, he was able to exhibit their artifacts on their own terms, in separate alcoves dividing the hall that were dedicated to each nation and its social practices.

By today’s standards, Boas’s tenure at the museum was not without fault. A family of Greenland Inuits lived and died in his care at the museum in 1897. After staging a mock funeral for the benefit of the one boy, Minik Wallace, who survived, Boas in fact dissected his father’s body and placed it in the museum’s collection. Wallace dedicated his life to the return of these desecrated remains.

Boas’s approach to tribal research nevertheless revolutionized his field as he went on to found the department of anthropology at Columbia University. Zora Neale Hurston, a disciple of Boas at Barnard, applied his groundbreaking methodology to preserving the folkways of the black South. The structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss likewise credited Boas with inspiring his own methodology in the 1940s, leading to his 1975 book The Way of the Masks.

In some aspects of the new Northwest Coast Hall, the legacy of Boas can still be felt. The tribal alcoves have been roughly retained. The Haida dugout canoe known as the “Great Canoe,” which for decades resided in the museum’s Seventy-seventh Street entrance, has been restored to the center of the hall where it appeared when the room first opened. Extensive labels also now accompany the restored artifacts, with some one thousand objects now on display. In the Kwakwaka’wakw section, for example, these labels describe and explain the fool masks of the red-cedar-bark ceremonies and the transformation masks of the myth of Siwidi, an ancestor taken by a giant octopus to an undersea kingdom who returns transformed as a sequence of sea animals.

The “Great Canoe” in the Northwest Coast Hall. Photo courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

The problem with the new hall, and it is a big one, is in its curatorial voice. Some ten contemporary tribal members are listed here as co- and consulting curators. The results come off as exhibition by committee and anthropology as memoir. The wall labels are almost all presented in the first person. The distinctions between science and myth, subject and object, are nowhere maintained. “The Haíltzaqv people have lived on the central coast of British Columbia in and around Wáglísla (Bella Bella) since time began,” reads one wall text. “The case lighting has been darkened at the request of Tlingit advisors to reflect the cultural sensitivity of these items,” reads another.

The leadership at the museum is now so beholden to contemporary First Nations, or at least makes such a show of being beholden to them, that the presentation drowns out the very objects of history meant for display. “We need to talk about racism!” exclaims one introductory wall label in an extra-large font. “Systemic racism has been present here since first contact with white people and persisted to this current moment and this conversation,” goes the welcome video on repeat loop. On another wall, under the label “Support native art—made by Native artists,” we are given examples of decorated skateboards, sneakers, and basketballs.

For all of the verbiage now packed into this one hall—aimed at best obliquely at the museumgoer new to this cultural content—certain names and stories are notably absent. Gone is the remarkable history surrounding the transportation of that sixty-three-foot Great Canoe, the largest dugout canoe in existence, which until recently was included with its display. Created around 1878 from a single piece of Western red cedar, the canoe was acquired by the museum and moved by steamer to the isthmus of Panama, where it was transported by rail to the Atlantic, then shipped to a Manhattan pier, then moved to the new museum by horse-drawn wagon.

Also absent is the story of Franz Boas himself. You might think that if you are telling a story of the survival of culture, you would include the role of the curator who saved it. It is unfortunate that today’s anthropology museum must scrub itself clean of its own fingerprints to create the illusion of native curatorial control. A display dedicated to the history of the hall would make for a genuinely revelatory introduction.

Instead we now learn almost exclusively of the museum’s historical mistakes. “An anthropologist working for the Museum recorded scant information about this carved house post when it was taken in 1909 from Haida territory in Alaska,” says one label. “Beginning in the latter half of the 1800s, anthropologists and other unsanctioned ‘collectors’ took the belongings and stole the actual bones of our Ancestors,” reads another. The only place Boas now appears, at least that I could find, is in the display of his remarkable 1896 model of the Kwakwaka’wakw village of Xwamdasbe’—“the earliest model of its kind still in existence,” reads the label. The text then proceeds to point out the model’s elisions and inaccuracies.

Today’s Northwest Coast Hall dwells in the present at the expense of the past. Lost finally in this modern-day political potlatch is a spirit of appreciation for the ancestors of anthropology. This is a sin of omission that rests on today’s museum leadership and its misleadingly selective use of native voices, not on these voices themselves.

Five years ago, Garfield George, the head of the Raven Beaver House of Angoon, Tlingit, accompanied at the podium by his young daughter, Violet Murphy-George, gave a dedication at the museum that deserves to be remembered. Since these words appear nowhere in the new hall, I reproduce them here:

In 1882 they set our canoes on fire, set our village on fire. Our food caches. But the canoe prow was taken care of by this great institution. It was one of the only canoes to survive the bombardment and was used to gather food. Gather materials. It was the canoe that saved us. Someone asked me recently if it is hard to see these objects in this museum. The answer is yes, it is, but it survived.

Today’s Northwest Coast Hall is a testament to all of those who worked for this survival—acknowledged and otherwise.