Adam Cvijanovic reimagined the iconic North American wildlife dioramas of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, originally painted by James Perry Wilson and others under James L. Clark. Drawing from the Hall of North American Animals, he transformed the gallery itself into a kind of remixed diorama.

Working in Flashe and latex paint on Tyvek mounted directly to the wall, Cvijanovic collapses staged, three-dimensional environments into monumental painted backdrops. The centerpiece, Discovery of America, stretched sixty-five feet across two walls. Mid-installation, the trompe-l’oeil scene shows two vast paintings colliding: one a prehistoric panorama where Pleistocene creatures roam a hybridized landscape from ice-age Alaska to ancient California; the other, based on an archival photograph, the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889. In their violent convergence, an America without humans crashes against one consumed by Manifest Destiny.

Other works continue this play of rupture and recontextualization. A piece drawn from the Wapiti diorama places Montana’s landscape within the shallow space of a studio, partially obscured by gestural brushstrokes, as elk wander across the boundary between painted nature and lived space. In the back gallery, Cvijanovic reconfigures taxidermy animals into cartoons and corpses. White-tailed deer become Bambi and his Disneyfied companions, while caribou appear as slaughtered carcasses.

Ultimately, Natural History is less about historical fact than about painting’s ability to reshape reality. Cvijanovic’s seamless fusion of realism, abstraction, spatial illusion, and cartoon probes the mutable, persuasive nature of images, offering a meditation on art’s power to transform how we see time, nature, and history.