At first glance, it’s a simple scene. Six adult bison and a calf mill around a stream. But Matt Davis invites me to look closer. We are at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, where Davis is an exhibition developer. As he shows me, there’s more to the diorama’s tale than a handful of once-living, now-taxidermied bison skins.
A well-worn path leads to the stream, and a bison skull sits to the side; this herd has been dropping by for some time. And they’re contributing to the ecosystem. Perched atop that skull and scattered around the scene are birds that feast on bugs kicked up by the bison.
Then Davis encourages me to step to the left. From here, I can peer into the trees on the display’s far right to spot what only one bison has noticed. Two wolves lurk, eyeing their next meal.
“Dioramas, they have such rich stories,” Davis says.
I’ve been viewing dioramas since I was a young child — whizzing by them like many visitors do — so they seem like standard museum fare to me. But imagine, Davis says, seeing this scene when the museum’s first diorama hall opened in 1925. There was no television yet; Technicolor movies had barely begun; National Geographic wouldn’t publish a color photograph on its cover until 1959. For many city dwellers, the new dioramas were the only way to see animals as they might live. “It would be like the most crazy virtual reality experience you can imagine,” Davis says. “People were totally blown away by this.”
Dioramas presented lifelike scenes in a manner that earlier museum exhibits did not. While museums once used skeletons and other specimens to emphasize the classification of animals and their evolutionary relationships, dioramas — characterized by rich backgrounds, detailed foregrounds and a mix of taxidermied animals arranged as if they were alive and interacting — emphasized the nascent science of ecology in a way that spoke to viewers at an emotional level.
Over the decades, though, dioramas have become dusty museum pieces themselves. These time capsules preserve the thinking of their time, including some biases that can be scientifically inaccurate, like an overemphasis on prize male specimens. And taxidermied still lifes must compete for attention in a multimedia world.
Indeed, by 2000, many museums were wondering if they should toss their dioramas as old-fashioned space-hogs that stretched the truth in the name of storytelling. The displays were considered dull or downright creepy by some museum visitors; others criticized the echoes of an age when wealthy, white, male hunters grabbed fauna from native habitats to put on display.
This “diorama dilemma” prompted some museums to reduce or remove displays. Others, recognizing the powerful hold that dioramas can still have on visitors, kept the displays in place.
Nonetheless, modern sensibilities have forced a reckoning with dioramas’ less-than-savory histories. In LA and elsewhere, curators and artists are experimenting with novel formats. At some institutions, curators are wrestling with challenges that come up when humans are depicted in offensive or blatantly racist manners. Sometimes, it turns out, no amount of effort can make historical dioramas fit the modern age.
“This reframing, it’s the next step that needs to happen,” says Aaron Smith, director of exhibitions at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. But it’s not a diorama death knell. “This awe and wonder aspect, that still exists.”
The dawn of dioramas
It’s hard to pinpoint the very first dioramas, but during the 1780s, Philadelphia painter, naturalist and taxidermist Charles Willson Peale displayed specimens in what one visitor described as “a romantic and amusing manner.” In an exhibit area attached to his home, Peale erected an earthen mound with turf and trees, a thicket and artificial pond, and populated it with an array of lifelike specimens, from waterfowl and fish in the pond to birds in the trees and rattlesnakes, raccoons and a tiger on the land.
Later natural history displays would be influenced by the evolution of other forms of popular entertainment. By 1800, some cities were opening panoramas, circular or lengthy paintings that provided an immersive experience. These spawned a variety of other “-oramas,” such as georamas that displayed Earth’s features on the inner surface of a giant hollow globe. Natural history museums broadly adopted the habitat diorama approach around the dawn of the 1900s.
It is probably not a coincidence that dioramas became popular as a major change in biology was happening: the emergence of ecology, the study of how organisms interact with each other and their environment. Dioramas illustrate this concept in a way that individual specimens cannot.
In the United States, Carl Akeley and other skilled taxidermists led the charge to create dioramas with three key features: real animal specimens grouped in lifelike poses, painted backdrops and foregrounds with plants and rocks. These displays melded art and science in a new form of edutainment.
This educational entertainment always contained a bit of a paradox. The taxidermists led hunting expeditions, shooting the most spectacular specimens, often of endangered animals, to bring home and display for the public. These hunter-taxidermists, worried about extinction, saw their work as a means to preserve the last of disappearing species for future generations. But the trips were also a good time for big-game hunters, whose fun was enabled by their relationships with museums. Today, this history of hunting and killing animals rubs some people the wrong way. “A lot of this was boys with their toys,” says Marjorie Schwarzer, author of Riches, Rivals and Radicals: A History of Museums in the United States. “These were baggers and taggers.”
These trips were genuine scientific expeditions, too. Researchers collected insects, plants and other specimens. Many explorers, as I am delighted to learn, were women — such as the botanist Alice Eastwood, a curator at San Francisco’s Cal Academy, and Akeley’s wife, Delia. While the prime skins went into the glass cases, bones and other material entered the museums’ research collections. Explorers also collected the scenery itself, taking photographs or lugging home paintings that were reproduced to set some dioramas in real, specific locales.
The hope was these scenes would inspire viewers to want to conserve these charismatic species, though there’s little direct research to confirm if this was the actual result. However, the fears of diorama designers — that many species would soon exist solely in museums — didn’t always come to pass. Sometimes, this was a direct result of efforts by the taxidermists themselves.
For example, Akeley shot mountain gorillas in what was then the Belgian Congo on behalf of New York City’s American Museum of Natural History, or AMNH. But he was so affected by the experience that he persuaded King Albert I of Belgium to establish Africa’s first wildlife sanctuary, now called Virunga National Park. Today, the park — in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — is home to around 350 endangered mountain gorillas.
William Temple Hornaday, another of the early diorama makers, traveled to Montana in 1886 to collect bison for the Smithsonian Institution. Shocked by the rapid decline in their population, he became a conservationist and brought back live animals, too. These bison, initially displayed on the National Mall, became the first animals in the National Zoological Park, which was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1889.
Rescuing dioramas
But 100 years later, museums were beginning to wonder if dioramas still had a place. Feminist scholar Donna Haraway in 1989 decried a focus on virile male hunters and spectacular male specimens. In the face of multimedia and interactive exhibits, Willard Boyd, former director of the Field Museum in Chicago, has admitted that to some visitors, the diorama hall amounted to an unappealing “dead zoo.”
In 2003, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., removed its scenic dioramas in favor of a mammal hall that emphasizes evolution with animals displayed against minimalist backdrops. And during a rebuild in the early 2000s, the Cal Academy slashed its diorama collection, making room for new exhibits such as a four-story, living rainforest. Other museums experimented with modernization, deploying interactive displays and animatronics.
But those decisions weren’t necessarily rooted in research on dioramas’ educational or historical value. So the Oakland Museum of California, as it considered dumping its dioramas, commissioned Schwarzer and a curator to study the concept first. After a thorough analysis of 30 studies of more than 3,800 people viewing dioramas at 17 institutions, the pair in 2009 came up with a strong case for dioramas. It turns out that the displays are second only to dinosaurs in getting visitors to stop to view them.
The dioramas did not change how people felt about conservation, though they did reinforce concerns people already had. They also sparked a range of emotional responses, including being creeped out by dead animals. But overall, most people love dioramas, the study found.
Modern museum staff corroborate this anecdotally. “I do walk-throughs all the time of the museum, and I can hear the ‘Whooooaaaa!’ ” says Mariana Di Giacomo, natural history conservator for the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven, Conn. The Peabody’s oldest and largest dioramas illustrate Connecticut’s coastal region and a forest edge.
For many museums, dioramas have become something to preserve. New York City’s AMNH began restoring its Bernard Family Hall of North American Mammals in 2011, reopening in 2012.
Chicago’s Field Museum, meanwhile, finished a diorama started by Akeley more than a century earlier. He’d mounted four striped hyenas shot during an 1896 expedition, but they never received the full scenic treatment. In 2015, the museum started a social media campaign to fund a completed diorama. In just six weeks, about 1,500 donors raised more than $150,000.
“It showed us that there is an enduring interest in these dioramas,” says Gretchen Baker, the museum’s exhibitions planning and operations director at the time.
Reframing dioramas
Back in Los Angeles, upstairs from the placid bison, I encounter a drastically different scene. The diorama “Special Species” pulses with changing lighting and psychedelic colors. No one has to tell me to stand still and drink this one in.
It’s part of the LA museum’s new exhibit, “Reframing Dioramas: The Art of Preserving Wilderness,” which opened in September 2024. The project aims to recognize dioramas for the historical artwork they are while incorporating modern science and sensibilities. “It’s a hall on dioramas, not a hall of dioramas,” Davis says.
In “Special Species,” piñata-style sculptures depict at-risk California critters — including Chinook salmon and the desert tortoise — as fantastical Mexican creatures called alebrijes (as in the film Coco). Alhambra, Calif.–based artist Jason Chang, who goes by RFX1, was on a team of three who created the diorama. Echoing the diorama designers of old, he hopes viewers will walk away with “an urgency to protect the environment.”
In “The Ever-Changing Flow,” video projections illustrate how the Los Angeles River evolved over centuries. “A Peculiar Garden” shows an eerie, postapocalyptic scene in which wildebeest sip from a polluted stream amid metal-plated plants. Seattle artist Saul Becker explains that “a garden is a very unnatural arrangement of nature.”
In other displays, “Reframing Dioramas” illustrates how dioramas came to be and inserts daring new scenes among more traditional ones. For instance, one shows a diorama-in-progress. Its backdrop is about 10 percent painted, and a table holds elements that would go into the scene: a fur, a sculpted body form, glass eyes, fake leaves, a few insects and more. Another display features a camp-style tent and acknowledges the power imbalances at work when wealthy, white hunters traveled to distant locales to extract specimens. Today, it notes, most large specimens the museum mounts died of natural causes and are acquired mainly from zoos or wildlife centers.
“Reframing is stepping outside of the way in which people view [dioramas],” Lori Bettison- Varga, president and director of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, says. “What are these really meant to do, how are they created, why do we still have them, and then how can we think about humans’ position in the environment differently?”
Battling biases
There’s plenty to reframe. Despite painstaking research by their creators, many classic dioramas are not entirely scientific. “A lot of people have called them, in the past, ‘bad science’ because they personify animals,” Schwarzer says.
Many illustrate nuclear family groupings that in no way reflect animal lifestyles. Berenstain Bears aside, papa bear does not stick around to help raise the cubs. “Papa bear might eat a couple of the cubbies,” Schwarzer tells me.
Some exhibits misrepresent female animals, says Baker, now director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, as she shows me around the mammal hall. In the moose diorama, the female is standing in water, which allowed the designers to make her appear shorter than the male on land. And it’s often females who lead animal groups, Baker notes. Homosexuality exists in nature, too, she adds — but rarely makes an appearance in the diorama hall.
In many cases, diorama designers probably wanted to show the different developmental stages of a species, says Mark Alvey, the Field Museum’s academic communications manager. Groupings that look like stereotypical human families were instead a convenient way to exhibit adult males, adult females and young.
“We always knew it was wrong,” Davis says. “Now, we’re slowly trying to fix some of those things.” For example, the LA museum has added more females to its lion pride over the years.
The human element in dioramas
Museum curators also acknowledge problems in how humans are — or aren’t — depicted in dioramas. Some ignore humans completely, erasing the long-term presence of Indigenous peoples as well as the impacts of modern societies. Very little of the world exists in that virgin state. “The kind of nature that dioramas exhibit, it’s very unnatural,” says Martha Marandino, a professor of biology education at the University of São Paulo. As part of this ongoing reframing, museums are beginning to acknowledge that missing human element.
Some dioramas did, though, include hints of human presence. Peabody visitors, for example, see farms painted in the background of the two biggest displays; one also depicts a shell midden, a prehistoric trash pile left by Indigenous people.
AMNH faced a dilemma with its “Old New York” display. Fashioned in 1939, it illustrates a fictitious 1660 meeting between Dutch leader Peter Stuyvesant and a delegation of Lenape dignitaries, the original stewards of the land that became Manhattan. Stereotypes riddle the display. Only Lenape men are in on the discussion, and they are shown in loincloths — not how they would have dressed for a diplomatic conference. The women, inaccurately relegated to the background, are topless, with long, impractical skirts. Only Stuyvesant was identified by name.
Rather than remove the diorama, the museum decided to keep it on display for now to acknowledge and apologize for the harm done by the depiction. In 2018, curators added labels right on the glass to explain the various problems with the diorama and to name the Lenape leader Oratamin.
But sometimes reframing isn’t possible. Take “Lion Attacking a Dromedary.” This Carnegie natural history display showed a dark-skinned man on camelback under attack by the titular feline, a second lion below. It was never quite a diorama in the most traditional, natural history sense, as it wasn’t always displayed with a detailed background and it lacked a foreground.
The display, which contained a real human skull in the mannikin’s head, had a long and meandering history. It was created by brothers Édouard and Jules Verreaux, traveling collectors, taxidermists and known grave robbers, for the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where it received a gold medal. AMNH then acquired it.
That museum took the display down in 1898, reportedly because it was considered unscientific. One lion was male, but it’s generally females who hunt. Worse, the man was garbed in an inaccurate mishmash of clothing that represents no specific culture. “It’s not educating anyone on anything that ever existed,” says Aja Lans, a bioarchaeologist at Johns Hopkins University.
Industrialist Andrew Carnegie bought it in 1899 for about $50 plus $45 shipping (equivalent to more than $3,000 today), for his new museum in Pittsburgh. In recent years, the museum has tried various forms of reframing. They covered the sides, and erected warning signs, so people who didn’t want to view it could give it a pass. They added extra written material enumerating the problematic aspects.
The Black Lives Matter movement and the 2020 murder of George Floyd brought all of its problems to the fore. “This diorama was kind of like a poster child for all of these questions that were coming up at the moment,” Baker says. “It was kind of this symbol of a time in natural history museums when we would display the other, the exotic, the colonized.” That summer, the museum covered the display completely.
Finally, in the fall of 2023, after the museum’s board of trustees voted to no longer display human remains, the diorama was permanently shuttered. It’s now being dismantled. Using samples from two of the teeth, Lans and colleagues are trying to identify the geographic origin of the human remains and repatriate them. Lans expects to have preliminary results by April.
But in many cases, wildlife dioramas, despite little inconsistencies, still serve their intended purpose: bringing striking nature scenes to museumgoers who might never see such animals in the wild. And they retain an old- fashioned power to inspire wonder and a love of nature.
The ones museums keep around will continue to evolve, and Davis hopes the Los Angeles exhibit lights the way. “We don’t think this will be the last word on dioramas,” he tells me. “We hope it’s the first word.”
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