If you ever find yourself walking on New York City’s Upper West Side and missing your Hudson Valley home, visit the American Museum of Natural History.
Head downstairs to the dimly lit Felix M. Warburg Hall of New York State Environment and make your way to the southwestern section. There, near the museum’s west exit, you’ll find a diorama titled “An October Afternoon Near Stissing Mountain.” This piece — part painting, part lifelike sculpture — is in a portion of the museum with little foot traffic.
“[The diorama] is very close to what you’re seeing in front of you in nature,” said Laura Friedman, the assistant director for production at the museum. “The attention to detail is very extreme.”
The artwork portrays the view from the foot of Stissing Mountain, cast in late afternoon reds and yellows, surrounded by turning leaves. The mountain in the background is painted, whereas the foliage in the foreground is sculpted from fortified papier-mâché, wax, and mesh moulds. A taxidermied fox is poised behind a boulder. “The area where the [background and foreground] meet each other should become as invisible as possible,” said Friedman.
During a recent afternoon, visitors who found their way to this part of the museum — perhaps en route to the blue whale exhibit, the planetarium, or the popular butterfly vivarium — stopped in their tracks to find a moment of peace before the verdant valley.
Surrounding the diorama are display cases that use Stissing Mountain and Pine Plains as a case study in geological rock formations, prehistoric glacial movements, and ancient farming practices. Since its inception in 1951, the Felix M. Warburg Hall has aspired to educate young people about the rich biodiversity in nearby areas.
The hall opened in 1951, named after the prominent German-American philanthropist who immigrated to the United States in 1894. Warburg provided instrumental humanitarian aid to Jews in Europe during World War I. He served on the boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tuskegee Institute, and Harvard University, and donated his grand Fifth Avenue home to what is now the Jewish Museum.
Harry L. Shapiro, head of the museum’s anthropological department at the time of the hall’s opening, a summer Pine Plains resident, took a leading role in the curation of the hall, and in bringing the Pine Plains focus to the exhibit.
The rest of the exhibit surrounding the diorama explains the evolution of Stissing Mountain over the course of more than a billion years. It began as a lump of gneiss, a type of rock formed under intense heat and branded with a distinctive marbling pattern.
Fast forward about 500 million years to the Cambrian Period and the mountain was submerged, part of a shallow tendril of the ocean, allowing deposits of shale, limestone, and quartzite to build up. After millions of years of erosion, the hard core of Stissing was sculpted, 1,500 feet high, with its distinctive sharp edge.
At the end of the last Ice Age, about 15,000 years ago, the ice front — with ice as thick as the height of the Empire State Building — started to recede, carving out the Hudson River in its wake, while mammoths and mastodons prowled the retreating edge alongside Lenape Native Americans.
Beside a topographical map of Stissing Mountain is a gnarled mastodon molar about the size of a fist; next to it, a fossilized dinosaur track. A reconstruction of glacial till — a mixture of debris deposited by a glacier as it melts or advances — is illuminated in the corner, where layers of sediment and boulders mark time through their size and depth.
A diorama of Thompson Pond is just around the corner. The museum takes this opportunity to zoom in on the lives of cattails, caterpillars, catfish, and more creatures and critters living in this wetland, all interconnected, thriving where food is most abundant and inhabiting niches where they can find respite from predation.
The making of a diorama is a multiperson job, and requires both an artist’s eye and a scientist’s precision. Dioramists will conduct studies at the real location of the scene, taking photos or, more traditionally, making watercolor paintings. Samples of foliage, whether they’re leaves, branches, or boulders, are brought back to the museum and preserved, and either used in the diorama itself or replicated through the creation of plaster moulds.
“What’s really important is that the people who are creating the diorama are the people that collect the material,” said Friedman, who has worked on and collected materials for dioramas throughout her career. “They’ve seen it in nature, and they can come back and recreate it.”
The exhibit pulls viewers in different directions. The friendly Stissing Mountain diorama is homey, whereas the colossal epochs of time portrayed by mastodon molars and ancient rock formations can make you feel like a tiny spec in this grand tale, much older than humanity itself.
The neighboring wall depicts more from the present day, where a historical survey of farming practices in Dutchess County is laid out — from the handcrafted tools of the Native Americans to the mechanised farming of the 20th century.
Returning again to “An October Afternoon Near Stissing Mountain,” the feeling is one of having traversed through that tale, learning about Cambrian trilobites, Ice Age mastodons, and ourselves, appreciating the same rocksteady Stissing Mountain with a renewed interconnectedness to every living thing.
I imagine that some day the Museum will want to replace this exhibit with something new. I wonder: could there be a home for the exhibit in Pine Plains, if and when AMNH is ready to remove it?