A few months ago I started craving a visit to the Museum of Natural History here in New York. I wanted to see those lush, old, retro-colored dioramas filled with stuffed animals. After many failed attempts to organize a trip, the big day arrived yesterday.
What's not to love about these dioramas? (Except for the depressing part about the dead animals/taxidermy, and seeing baby animals and wondering how those were collected...Let's ignore that part.) The aesthetic is fantastic! And there are so many different hallways and exhibits to walk through! The bears will always be my favorite, but the African Mammals exhibit was amazing as well. Two floors of all sorts of familiar and unfamiliar creatures, like elephants and ostrichs and greater and lesser koodoos and elands (a word I know only from crossword puzzles) and so many more.
The highlight of the visit, besides the diaromas, was seeing a special exhibit called Extreme Mammals. We learned about the biggest and smallest mammals, yes, but the best part was seeing lots of creepy weird mammals that went extinct thousands of years ago...beavers with horns, whales with four legs, and a wooly mammoth-type monster with a long silly gonzo nose, to name a few. We watched sugar gliders hop around a little mini-environment, and discussed the pros and cons of having baleen instead of teeth. Just fyi: humans are apparently the only two-legged mammals who "walk" - I think all the others hop? Or most of the others hop, and some do other things? Still. We are unique!
Meanwhile, I'm still working on finding a local place to show some art. I have organized the results, but there is a bit more fact-finding to do before I narrow it down to a few places to actually approach. I started working on my artist statement, and am varnishing a few pieces that I want to move out of here. More information to come!
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