The People Have Spoken — And They Want Their Dioramas
- SaveMPM
- Apr 2
- 4 min read
When Milwaukeeans were invited to “reimagine” the museum’s beloved dioramas, nearly all of them chose to lovingly recreate them instead. That’s not failure — it’s a message.
On the evening of March 31, 2026, local artists and enthusiasts gathered at the Milwaukee Public Museum for the 10th annual Diorama-Rama contest — a community celebration of the museum’s most iconic feature. The theme this year was bold and intentional: “NDM/MPM: Dioramas Revisited, Reinvented, Reimagined.” Participants were explicitly invited to put their own spin on MPM’s dioramas — to challenge, reinterpret, transform.
Nearly no one did.
Instead, the room filled with meticulous miniature recreations. The Crow Buffalo Hunt diorama drew multiple interpretations, as did the iconic snake button display. Sampson the Gorilla drew his own devoted entry. The ancient Silurian Reef was rendered three different ways. The Hell Creek dinosaurs, the Ocean Portals, the Butterfly exhibit — all faithfully recreated, in miniature, by people who clearly know these halls by heart.
The winner? Artist Nicki Utecht’s exacting, painstaking recreation of Carl Akeley’s original 1890 Muskrat habitat — complete with miniature muskrats she hand-felted from wool. The very diorama that started it all, lovingly rebuilt from scratch, took home the top prize. People bent over tiny figures and painted backdrops for weeks, not to critique what MPM built, but to honor it. To hold onto it.
“When given total creative freedom, the public’s overwhelming instinct was to preserve — not to reinvent.” — SaveMPM.org
What the event was meant to be
The Diorama-Rama is organized by National Diorama Month, founded by Danelle “D” Kirschling, and this year marked a milestone: the 10th anniversary of the very first Diorama-Rama, held back at MPM a decade ago. The partnership with MPM this year was especially poignant — 2026 is the final year in MPM’s current building before the institution moves and becomes the Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin.
BACKGROUND
MPM is credited with pioneering the “Milwaukee style” of museum diorama, originating with Carl Akeley’s 1890 Muskrat Family Group. That diorama still stands on the first floor today and is confirmed to be moving to the new NCMW building. Museum leaders have described future dioramas as “immersive and object-based” — but specifics remain vague.
The theme “Revisited, Reinvented, Reimagined” was, presumably, an invitation to be playful. To do something unexpected. Artists could deconstruct a diorama’s narrative, challenge its point of view, flip its perspective, satirize its assumptions. This is, after all, the language that cultural institutions often use when signaling their openness to critical reconsideration.
That almost universally did not happen. Participant after participant built faithful, loving, small-scale replicas of their favorite MPM dioramas. Some added personal touches. Some took creative liberties with materials. But the core impulse — recreate what they love, as it is — dominated the room.
What this actually reveals
For years, we have heard a particular line of reasoning from those steering MPM’s transition to the new museum. The argument goes something like this: the old dioramas are outdated. They reflect an era of museum-making that is culturally incompetent by contemporary standards. They present nature and human cultures through an imperial, objectifying lens. The new museum will do better.
There is a kernel of honest critique buried in that argument. Any thoughtful person acknowledges that mid-20th century museums made choices — about whose stories to center, and how — that warrant examination. We have never disputed that.
What we have disputed is the leap from “examine and contextualize” to “replace and reimagine wholesale.” And the Diorama-Rama results add a striking piece of evidence to that debate.
Here is the telling detail: These were self-selecting participants — people who cared enough about MPM’s dioramas to build miniature versions of them from scratch, at their own time and expense. They were invited, even encouraged, to reimagine. They chose not to. They chose to preserve. That is not apathy or a lack of imagination. That is a community expressing, in the most direct way possible, what it values.
A different kind of cultural competence
The word “reimagined” carries a particular weight in contemporary museum discourse. It often signals that something old is being set aside in favor of something new — something more aligned with current interpretive frameworks. We understand the impulse, and we do not dismiss it entirely.
But cultural competence cuts in more than one direction. It also means listening to a community when it tells you what it finds meaningful. It means recognizing that a 135-year-old diorama of a muskrat colony isn’t just a taxidermy display — it is a shared landmark, a generational memory, a specific kind of Milwaukee wonder that no amount of “immersive” modern exhibit design has yet replicated.
The Diorama-Rama participants were not told to love the old dioramas. They were not told to recreate them. They were told, explicitly, to do something new. Their collective response was: we’d rather not.
“The community’s message isn’t that the dioramas are perfect. It’s that they are irreplaceable — and that replacing them requires earning it.”
What we’re asking for
SaveMPM.org has never argued for freezing Milwaukee’s museum in amber. We have argued for honesty, transparency, and genuine public input in the decisions being made about what comes next.
The Diorama-Rama — a joyful, community-organized event with no political agenda — inadvertently produced one of the clearest pieces of public feedback we have seen: when Milwaukeeans think about MPM’s dioramas, their instinct is to hold them close, not to let them go.
We ask that the leaders of the Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin take that seriously. Not as a veto on change, but as a mandate for care. The new museum has an opportunity to honor what MPM built — genuinely, specifically, in ways that go beyond vague promises of “immersive, object-based” experiences — while also growing into something Milwaukee can be proud of for another century.
The people have spoken. They built dioramas to prove it.
Thousands of Milwaukeeans care deeply about what happens to MPM’s legacy. Sign the petition and let decision-makers know that the public is paying attention.
Sources
"Mandatory Milwaukee: Dioramas, Diorama-Rama." Milwaukee Record. milwaukeerecord.com/arts/mandatory-milwaukee-dioramas-diorama-rama/
"NDM/MPM: Dioramas Revisited, Reinvented, Reimagined." National Diorama Month. nationaldioramamonth.com
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