SaveMPM

Long before the closure debate, a small team of painters, sculptors, and taxidermists spent decades building Milwaukee Public Museum's dioramas by hand. A digitized 1986 staff feature — presented here as a flip-through book — names them.

A 200-year-old diorama from Suriname sold at Christie's for £11,875 and hangs in the Rijksmuseum's "100 Masterpieces" series. Milwaukee Public Museum's own Porteus dioramas — built for the public, already proven to survive a relocation — are treated as disposable. We put the two collections side by side.

In 1973, a Milwaukee Journal reporter got backstage access to exactly how MPM built its dioramas — sugar for snow, paper for leaves, fiberglass Masai figures light enough to balance on one iron bar. Fifty years later, that record isn't nostalgia. It's evidence of a craft the Museum is now being asked to walk away from.