Of Moose and Men: Musings on Taxidermy at the New York State Museum

Jamie Clifford, WPAMC ’25

I have fond childhood memories of visiting the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. Surpassing even the fossilized dinosaurs, my favorite exhibition was the Hall of Mammals. That the array of taxidermy animals I was looking at were the remains of once-living creatures never fully registered to me. I certainly had no sense of the larger conversations surrounding taxidermy in the twenty-first century. Scholars have argued against the display of taxidermy in museums — at best, it is irrelevant in the age of television and internet; at worst, it perpetuates imperialist narratives that exoticize and “other” the non-Western world. For many museum-goers, however, taxidermy simply makes them squeamish.

All that said, I admit to feeling a sense of childlike wonder as I walked through the New York State Museum’s Adirondack Wilderness exhibition, which tells the story of logging, mining, and eventual tourism in this region during the nineteenth century and beyond. A series of dioramas representing the flora and fauna of the Adirondack forest interspersed throughout the exhibition serves as a reminder of the animal populations at stake in this human story. The moose seen above is accompanied by a label discussing the extermination of New York’s moose population in the 1860s and its triumphant return in the 1980s. Similar narratives appear throughout the exhibition. Timber wolves were hunted by colonists fearing for the safety of their domestic animals and exterminated by bounty hunters in the 1890s, while the logging of evergreen trees in the nineteenth century allowed for increased growth of hardwood trees, in turn supporting an increase in the deer population. These labels collectively gesture to a complicated story of conservation and destruction in the Adirondack forest in which moose and conservationists, timber wolves and ranchers, loggers and deciduous trees all play starring roles.

The New York State Museum’s expansive collection of zoological specimens, today under the purview of the Curator of Birds and Mammals, provides an opportunity to unite its history and archaeology collections with objects more commonly stewarded and interpreted by natural history museums. However, its current interpretation might be nuanced through further engagement with the very objects it uses to tell these stories of human-animal interactions. Taxidermy, which reached the height of its popularity in the United States in the nineteenth century before declining in the early twentieth, is simultaneously an act of conservation and destruction, ending an animal life to preserve its remains for decades of museum visitors. In recreating scenes of nature, complete with plastic plants and painted backdrops, dioramas elicit awe for the natural world while reminding us of their own artificiality. These contradictions, which I felt keenly during my time in Adirondack Wilderness exhibition, are a crucial part of the story of humans and animals in New York that poses many questions for further exploration.

References:

“Adirondack Wilderness | The New York State Museum.” Accessed September 6, 2024. https://www.nysm.nysed.gov/exhibitions/ongoing/adirondack-wilderness-0.

“History of Museum | The New York State Museum.” Accessed September 6, 2024. https://www.nysm.nysed.gov/about/history.

Le Gallais, Jacob. “Animal Bodies in the Museum: Acts of Artmaking, Collective Knowledge, and Complex Conversation Around Museum Taxidermy.” Canadian Review of Art Education 49, no. 1 (2022): 2–20. 

Poliquin, Rachel. “The Matter and Meaning of Museum Taxidermy.” Museum & Society 6, no. 2 (2008): 123–34.“Adirondack Wilderness | The New York State Museum.” Accessed September 6, 2024. https://www.nysm.nysed.gov/exhibitions/ongoing/adirondack-wilderness-0.