Breaking out of the diorama

With 90 years under its belt and 33 million objects in its pockets, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is a fixture of Exposition Park. It’s where schoolkids go to see dinosaur skeletons, dioramas of African and American mammals, an insect zoo and California gold. It’s Los Angeles’ closet, a conglomeration of specimens and artifacts stuffed into a 1913 Beaux Arts palace with a batch of mismatched additions.

But fixtures wear out, and this one is struggling to revitalize itself with a fresh image and a $300-million expansion plan. It’s as if the museum is saying, “Hey, what about me?” to a constituency that has either forgotten it or taken it for granted.

“Los Angeles has the raw ingredients to have a world-class natural history museum,” says Jane Pisano, the museum’s president and director, who took charge three years ago. “It could be a jewel in the crown of the city, just like the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum in Chicago.”

In the United States, the Los Angeles museum’s collection is topped only by the 124-million-piece cache at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The American Museum has 30 million specimens and artifacts; the Field has 22 million. But the L.A. museum’s $27-million annual operating budget and 410,000-square-foot building don’t measure up to those of its peers. Annual attendance, about 1 million, has more than doubled during Pisano’s tenure but still lags far behind the National’s 6.5 million, the American’s 3 million and the Field’s 2 million.

That’s not the way things should be, says Pisano, who is overseeing a transformation of the museum’s programs and facilities. The curatorial staff has spearheaded a new look in exhibitions, in sync with a nationwide effort to make natural history more relevant to a broader public by focusing on ecological and environmental issues. And a fully funded, $13.5-million restoration of the building’s historic core is about to begin. But fundraising for a major renovation and expansion, designed by New York architect Steven Holl, has only begun. A tentative plan, announced in July 2002 and in process, calls for demolishing post-1920s additions to the building and constructing a new wing with underground parking. The schematic design is expected to be complete early next year.

“The building is just part of a larger institutional change,” says Pisano, declining to speculate about when all the money might be in place to begin Holl’s project. “To make a compelling case to a donor, you have to present more than a building plan. You have to talk about who you are, why you make a difference to society and the community, and why someone should contribute to you as opposed to any other worthy cause. All of that is about your mission, your vision, your programs. We are on track with that.”

NEW ASPIRATIONS

Just how hard it is to rally financial support for an old institution with new ideas remains to be seen. But the museum’s changing aspirations are already on view -- in two stuffed coyotes.

One of these beasts is a minor character in a cavernous hall of dioramas that has presented taxidermic mammals in their natural habitats for the past 70 years. This coyote has returned to his lair in the Owens Valley to feed his family, with a limp jack rabbit in his mouth. The classic diorama presents the natural order of life and death in the wild, in a glass-covered scene that resembles a traditional painting.

The other coyote is a nighttime urban raider who plays a provocative role in “L.A.: Light/Motion/Dreams,” an up-to-the-minute, multimedia exhibition with a $1.3-million budget. He also holds his dinner by the back of the neck, but it’s somebody’s pet cat. Standing on a real diving board over a simulated backyard swimming pool, the coyote stares at the adjoining house. With no glass barrier holding them back, visitors walk right into a confrontation between man and nature, and it isn’t a pretty picture.

The message is subtler in another section of the show, where videotaped footage of L.A.’s nature and culture, projected on mirrors, allows viewers to ponder the environmental impact of urban sprawl while enjoying a kaleidoscopic spectacle. But just around the corner is a stuffed raccoon in a trash can. Farther along, a replicated section of the Los Angeles River makes pointed comparisons between the sylvan past and the concrete-walled, graffiti-covered present.

Is this any way to run a natural history museum? Pisano thinks so.

“Our purpose is not only to be a repository where people can observe and learn,” she says, “but to present our collections in ways that inspire people to take responsibility. If we do our job right, we are going to sensitize people to the importance of their nature and their culture in a way that will make them better citizens.”

“L.A.: Light/Motion/Dreams” is a landmark event at the museum, designed to illuminate its new, activist mission -- “to inspire wonder, discovery and responsibility for our natural and cultural worlds.” Combining 400 objects from the collection with photographs, film, video, sound and specially commissioned artworks, it provides a sharp contrast to the conventional displays.

Vanda Vitali, vice president of public programs, says the exhibition represents a fundamental shift of perspective, from the past to the present and future.

The focus on environmental stewardship reflects a national trend. While continuing to collect, conserve, study and exhibit specimens of anthropology, biology and mineral science -- as they have for the past century -- natural history museums are putting increasing emphasis on conservation at home and abroad.

“We have studied the environment since our founding in 1893,” says John W. McCarter, president and chief executive of the Field Museum, “but the nature of the work has changed in that we have become much more active. We have become advocates.”

Why?

“We as a species, Homo sapiens, are causing an environmental cataclysm,” McCarter says. “It’s so enormous that the responsibility of great natural history museums to record the diversity of life and then to protect areas that are threatened is global.” The need outstrips financial resources, but museums must do what they can, he says.

“We are the natural organizations to be engaged in environmental education and research,” says Michael W. Hager, executive director of the San Diego Natural History Museum. “Our environment is under assault. If we don’t address that, we will be left with eulogies.”

Many mission statements have been rewritten during the last decade or so to reflect that conviction. The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History aims to inspire “abiding respect for the natural world.” The mission of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia declares its intent “to create the basis for a healthy and sustainable planet.” The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh “conducts scientific inquiry that creates knowledge and promotes stewardship of Earth and its life.”

OUTREACH PROJECTS

Curators do their part by organizing exhibitions that encourage environmental awareness. “Frogs,” a current show featuring 200 live amphibians at the American Museum in New York, offers information about human activity that has decimated frog populations and destroyed their habitats. “Earth, Wind & Wildfire,” opening in October at the San Diego museum, will launch a series on the coexistence of people and powerful forces of nature. “Living Downstream,” a permanent installation at Philadelphia’s Academy, demonstrates how people’s actions affect water quality and what they can do to help the aquatic environment.

The museums’ research departments often spread the word about conservation in projects organized or facilitated by staff scientists. The Cleveland Museum of Natural History oversees 3,500 acres of natural preserves in the surrounding region. The Field Museum is a founding member of Chicago Wilderness, a coalition of environmental organizations that promotes the conservation and restoration of endangered areas in metropolitan Chicago. The Field’s scientists and anthropologists also work in Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and Brazil to document indigenous flora and fauna and persuade local governments to preserve vast areas as national parks.

Outreach projects such as these feed into the museums’ collections and programs, including exhibitions that go far beyond musty cases of preserved specimens.

“The way we present our collection will be our claim to innovation and greatness,” Pisano says. “It’s choosing stories that people are interested in knowing about and presenting them in a way that they find compelling and exciting. Our service to the public can’t just be about the past. We have to use the past to help people connect with the present and the future.”

“L.A.: Light/Motion/Dreams” is a start. But the territory of environmental stewardship can be fraught with peril for museums that depend on the support of people who might not want to be reminded of pressing problems.

“If we stick with awe and wonder, there’s no problem,” Hager says, referring to museums’ traditional approach to nature. “Conservation is a political issue.”

The key to handling controversial topics, museum leaders say, is to present information and allow people to draw their own conclusions.

“All of us who live in Los Angeles make choices that impact the sustainability of the city,” Pisano says. “We can really help people understand that, in a way that’s not preachy or dogmatic, that doesn’t come down hard on one side or the other but increases awareness and affects behavior.”

Conservation is only one of many issues encountered by students who visit the museum and use its outreach programs, says Diane Tom, a fifth-grade teacher at Roosevelt Elementary School in San Gabriel. For her students, the biggest thrill is often a visit to the museum’s Discovery Center, where they can handle a wide variety of specimens, or a lesson in her classroom, based on objects borrowed from the Members Loan Program.

“The museum is such a great resource,” she says. “It makes history and science come alive and provides hands-on enrichment.”

But the focus on conservation will continue next year in an exhibition that will launch a new book by Jared Diamond, the UCLA geography professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” is to be published in January, and the show will illustrate the hypothesis that exploitation of the environment can lead to the death of civilizations. Along with historical cases, there will be examples of current conflicts between conservation and development.

The point, Pisano says, is to ask: “What is the balance between environmental sustainability and economic growth and development?”

It’s a bold approach for the museum whose cornerstone was christened in 1910 with water from the Owens Valley and whose opening, Nov. 6, 1913, coincided with a celebration of the arrival of water along the aqueduct engineered by William Mulholland.

“You have to admire their sense of drama,” Pisano says of her predecessors. “This museum was the product of a rather clear civic vision. It was always intended to be an important civic space with cultural institutions.”

It grew out of a movement to clean up a derelict area that had become a haven for gamblers and prostitutes. The museum’s working title, the Los Angeles County Historical and Art Museum, is chiseled above the original entrance on the east side of the building. But it opened as the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art, with three wings -- one for each discipline -- branching out from a rotunda. The diorama halls and south foyer were added in the 1920s; the auditorium in 1960; the three-story structure on the north side in 1976.

The name has also been a work in progress. “County” was inserted after “Los Angeles” in 1931. Thirty years later, when the art division solidified a plan to form an independent institution -- the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Wilshire Boulevard -- the old museum became the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. That is still its legal name, but in 1998 the museum shuffled the words into a “common use” arrangement -- the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County -- that appears on its publications and signage.

The trustees seriously considered relocating the museum about five years ago but ultimately decided to stay in Exposition Park. Pisano joined the board, while serving as senior vice president of external relations at USC, with a strong conviction that the museum should be revitalized on its historic site. She became chief in fall 2001, taking up the challenge of helping an underappreciated cultural asset to re-create itself.

“This is a time of tremendous experimentation in cultural institutions,” Pisano says. “Everybody is trying to become a destination. And that’s exactly right. What is a cultural institution if it’s not a destination, a place where people can gather and learn? That’s the mark of a city, a great city. Anyone who cares about Los Angeles should care that this museum realizes its potential.”