The exhibit hall floor of the Dallas Museum of Natural History (or the Fair Park Visitor Center) creaked as Walt Davis walked across it while giving a tour of the wildlife dioramas.
Photography by Lauren Allen
These aren’t the shoebox dioramas you made in third grade but preserved animals mounted behind glass, surrounded by fabricated foliage with a painted landscape in the background. Davis, an 84-year-old CC Young Senior Living resident, oversaw the creation of a handful of the nearly 50 dioramas, which were built from the mid-1930s until the mid-1980s. Scenes from nine out of 10 of Texas’ ecological regions are shown, and coyotes, wolves, elk, deer, otters, foxes, various fowl and birds, wildcats, and bears are on display via taxidermy.
“They can see things that are disappearing,” says Davis, when asked what younger generations can gain by viewing the historical dioramas. “They’re not going to walk into the Trinity Forest and see an ivory-billed woodpecker. You can see one here from the Trinity Forest. So it is a record of change. And I would hope that it enables people to take action to preserve some of what was originally here. It’s the original Texas.”
The museum itself, which opened in 1936 and has been closed for years, is also an artifact of Dallas’s past. It was merged with The Science Place and the Dallas Children’s Museum to make the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in 2006. Collections were taken, and dioramas were left.
Walt Davis says there’s only one record of a grizzly bear found in Texas.
Davis had stories to go along with nearly all of them about the wildlife on display, the background artists and the process to create the large 3D portraits. Plantlife was crafted, but real dried grasses, dirt and rocks collected on-site are also used. Snow is made of salt. Larger elements were put in front and smaller ones in the back so the dioramas look like they are receding into the distance, connecting with the background paintings. They took months to build from the ground up, at least for the ones from Davis’s era, though he split his time with other work duties.
“All of the techniques were very simple,” Davis says. “Leaves were made of wax. Some of the leaves were made of paper. We didn’t have much in the way of plastics to work with back then. So it’s very much a handmade diorama.”
Davis’s relationship with the museum began in high school when he was working on an assignment. He was tasked with interviewing someone doing his dream job (narrowed down to teaching or museum work), and he was able to reach F.W. Miller, then-director of the Dallas Museum of Natural History.
“I came down. I interviewed. I wrote my paper. I made an A minus,” Davis says. “And in May, he called me with a job offer.”
He served as a student assistant each summer through college and returned after he graduated from the University of Texas.
Davis’s career is at the intersection of wildlife science and art. Growing up, he had an interest in birds and would wake up before anyone else and roam the creek with a pair of binoculars. In college, he wanted to switch his major from sciences to art, but his adviser discouraged that decision because of the number of credits he had. Still, he found the convergence of the two subjects when he had to observe and draw things in labs.
“When I came to the museum and I realized what these dioramas required, that was exactly what I wanted to do,” Davis says. “By accident, it came about that I got to do both things.”
He handled a variety of roles, but it became clear that he was best at building the exhibits, specifically, “taking your scientific specimen and using some artistic sense about how you display it.” The field work required for the dioramas — collecting materials, making molds, camping out on location — was Davis’s favorite part.
“You saw it in your head. You knew what you were aiming for, and it was a matter of collecting everything that you needed to make that thing new,” he says.
Davis thought the museum would continue the dioramas forever, but Louis F. Gorr, museum director from 1979 to 1986, turned toward paleontology and archaeology instead.
Thanks to volunteers staffing the museum, the dioramas are on display for the public from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sundays through at least Sept. 20, according to Fair Park’s website. The exhibit was originally supposed to close in July but was extended into the “foreseeable future,” Davis says. In fact, the creation of a Friends of the Natural History Museum group of outdoors enthusiasts and conservationists is in the works.
The museum saw thousands of visitors upon reopening this summer.
“We were thinking we’re going to bring in all these FIFA people. Well, it turned out these are people who had been to the museum as children, gone to classes here,” he says. “It’s like a family reunion, the building full of people with a common memory, sharing it. It’s a beautiful thing to see.”
