The Academy of Natural Sciences and New Media

The Academy of Natural Sciences
19th St and Ben Franklin Pkwy
Hours: 10-4:30 M-F; 10-5 Sat & Sun
Cost: Adults: $12; Students & Children <13: $10

Our visit to the Academy of Natural Sciences today filled me with awe and wonder. It has been too long, since I was a kid at least, since I've been here and I had totally forgotten about the dioramas. I have to admit when I think about natural science dioramas, what comes to mind are the ones I saw this summer at the visitor centers at the Cape May lighthouse and Peace Valley Park. They mostly just feature local animal life and are limited in scale and detail. I have to say, the dioramas at the Academy were certainly impressive in both their size not to mention breathtakingly beautiful and three-dimensional making you feel as if you were really out in nature with these animals. During our visit, we brought up the question of new media in the museum setting and how in the '30s when many of the diorama were being produced for this museum, this form of viewing exotic animals in their natural habitats WAS new...these days, we have television documentaries that show us the animals eating, sleeping and playing, but is this a better experience? Different, yes, but not better. Perhaps what drew me into the dioramas was the lack of technology - of sounds, lights, electronics - the things that are now the norm everywhere you go. It was the quietness and intimacy of the animals and their lands, how I focused so hard on finding that point where the ground met the painted backdrop and let my eye wander over the intricate details of the scenes. You just cannot get that kind of stillness and focus when the animals are all over the screen of a television, you can't really look at what is there like you can at the museum. Maybe its that my background is art that I'm so appreciative of the skill, precision and care that has gone into every item within these containers, whatever it is, I know that watching TV is nothing like this experience. Not only did we get to look at and talk about the natural history dioramas, but we also got a sneak peek at some elements of a exhibition slated for early 2012, "Shh...Secrets of the Diorama," and it looked really cool, with touchable objects and a cross section of an actual diorama animal - these are all examples of how interactive media can be used in the museum settings without necessarily reverting to flashy electronics - and it looked like it would work really well.

Charles Willson Peale: Independence Hall & Second Bank Portrait Gallery

Independence Hall

Hours: Mon-Fri 9am-4:30pm

Sat & Sun 9am-6pm

Cost: Free

Second Bank

Hours: Wed-Sun 11am-5pm

Cost: Free

On visiting the second floor of Independence Hall, where Charles Willson Peale kept his museum, the floor was furnished to recreate a different time and although it was not set up like his museum, luckily there are his own paintings of the space, which is pretty straightforward – a long room, to help envision how the museum was set up. We then went half a block to the Second Bank Portrait Gallery where many of the portraits that had been hanging in the Independence Hall museum are now located. It is here that the National Park Service uses many of Peale's paintings to do a partial reconstruction of his museum. The portraits are located at the top of the wall, just as Peale had them, and below where his specimens would have been, there is a layered wall lit from behind so that you can see images, drawings and so forth of the objects that would have been below the portraits, along with plaques describing Peale's museum and his influence. Something that I think is interesting is that the Second Bank Portrait Gallery is something of a museum preserving parts of another museum. Unfortunately the space could not be kept and many of Peale's natural history objects were sold off by his family after his death. In Susan Crane's essay, “Time, Memory, and Museums” she suggests that, “time is frozen in museums to the extent that its objects are preserved, their natural decay intentionally prevented.” Many different things could have been done with the remaining paintings that the City of Philadelphia bought from the auctioning of them, but the Second Bank chose to display his paintings in a similar fashion to the way Peale had, in a space not unlike the space in Independence Hall, and educate on his museum. In that aspect, the room preserves Peale's museum and the memory of Peale. Perhaps if all his museum objects he had had been destroyed or sold off all over the country or world, the memory of Peale's place in history would also be fainter than it is today.   

The Wagner Free Institute of Science

The Wagner Free Institute of Science

Website: http://www.wagnerfreeinstitute.org

Hours: Tues-Fri 9-4

Cost: Free

The Wagner Free Institute of Science is a little known Victorian-era natural history museum just off of Temple's Main Campus. Established in the 1800s by William Wagner, a wealthy businessman, the museums intended mission is and was to provide a free education in the sciences for anyone interested. The museum has an extensive lecture hall and library while upstairs you can view specimens ranging from geodes and fossils to taxidermied mammals and skeletons of all sorts of creatures. Underneath the exhibit cases are drawers, also containing intriguing items of the natural world. Nearly all of the specimens were collected and organized within the museum in the 1800s by Wagner himself or his predecessor, Dr. Joseph Leidy.

During our visit to the Wagner Museum, I noted from our class discussions that the interior of the specimen area was organized by Darwin's taxonomy which forces the viewer to see the objects in a way that creates a relationship with the objects around it, for example, the human skeleton is in a case in the center of the room close to where the visitor enters the room. Beside the human is a chimpanzee, then the following primates get progressively smaller and less related to human beings.

One of the things that sets the Wagner apart from other natural history museums that I've visited was this: all of the labels are written using the specimens latin nomenclature, most do not list the common name which makes figuring out what things are pretty difficult. This was mentioned in our class discussion afterwards as being a hinderance for anyone not knowledgable in latin and that part of the reason for this was that it forces the viewer to enroll in the free classes and lectures that are taught at the institute to access the knowledge of the viewing room. In general though, the Wagner museum is unlike any other natural history museum I have ever seem because it has preserved its methods of exhibiting since the late 1800s and therefore is a specimen of that time period itself.