Where Art & Science Unite
Millions of visitors a year explore the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where hundreds of AFSCME members work in a variety of jobs and specialties.
By Clyde Weiss
NEW YORK CITY
A huge pearl oyster, its lustrous shell spread open like a butterfly to reveal the fragile "creature" within, adorns a wall at the American Museum of Natural History. But this is no chemically preserved mollusk. It's a superb imitation: Senior museum "Preparators" David McCornack and Tory Ferraro spent nearly five months experimenting with various resins to make textured plastic resemble living tissue.
Few of the five million visitors who roam the museum's exhibition halls each year think about the talented people who work behind the scenes. Whether it's crafting larger-than-life marine creatures, painting prehistoric dioramas, photographing natural and manmade artifacts, preparing fossils for study or putting a face on extinct primates, these professionals take enormous pride in their work — and their union.
About 100 members of AFSCME Local 1559 (DC 37) work here, including scientific assistants, preparators, artists, photographers, instructors, technicians and clerical employees. Another 200 security officers, clericals, custodial workers, switchboard operators, carpenters, exhibition movers and others belong to Local 1306.
WHO ARE WE? Gary Sawyer, a senior technician in the Division of Anthropology, reverently picks up a book that changed his life: The Earth for Sam: The Story of Mountains, Rivers, Dinosaurs, and Man, by W. Maxwell Reed, first published in 1929.
Sawyer was in grade school when a book-mobile librarian showed the volume to him. "It was full of magnificent pictures of dinosaurs," he says. "But what really fascinated me" were photos of the busts of hominids — humans and their human-like ancestors — crafted by biologist/artist James Howard McGregor.
Young Sawyer peered at those extinct faces, wondering how McGregor knew what these creatures looked like. Or did he? The questions set him on a life-long journey to learn McGregor's techniques and continue his legacy of scientific study. Sawyer's quest led him to study physical anthropology and medicine. He even worked on human cadavers. Eventually, in 1976, he came here, to the very museum where McGregor had worked and still housed his busts. "I searched for references to his techniques" among McGregor's papers, he says, and "found one in a really old natural-history magazine."
Although it wasn't detailed, it was a start. The method involved crafting the soft tissue on top of skeletal models. Understanding how to do that, Sawyer says, "was my ultimate dream, and now it's happened. I can sit here and describe a technique that is both science and art. But how much is art, how much science?"
THE 'ARTISTS.' Sitting at an easel, scientific assistant Steve Thurston draws the fine details of the genitalia of a plant bug, which may be published in museum literature or even popular magazines. Interested in the science of plants while in school, he now sketches details of plants and insects — even those invisible to the human eye.
His tools are pencils and a computer, with which his scanned drawings can be further refined. Before he took the job, Thurston was a commercial illustrator. However, making money "never really stimulated my imagination or curiosity. In a museum, my work has a purpose and a meaning beyond the profit motive — the possibility that I'm contributing to extending knowledge."
An artist of a different stripe is Jackie Beckett, president of Local 1559. As a freelance photographer for the museum two decades ago, she studied with famed nature photographer Ansel Adams and has gone on to become its senior photographer. She works mostly with large-format cameras — the ones with the big bellows. Because the automatic camera makes it easy for scientists to take their own photographs, she seldom accompanies them in the field. "But when they want the glamour shots," she notes, "they have to bring it to a pro" — like her.
Combining art and science is McCornack's job in the Exhibition Department. The giant pearl oyster described at the beginning of this story, part of a temporary exhibit, was his project. Assisted by Ferraro, they experimented with various plastic resins to find a combination that would resemble the actual oyster's fleshy parts. "As they harden, resins go through a variety of stages, and you can manipulate them in different ways," he says. "One of the biggest problems was trying to get the implied depth that you see in the shiny part of the shell. It looks deep and warbly, but in fact it not only has a fairly smooth and even surface, it's also not as thick as it appears to be."
McCornack, who studied sculpture and landscape painting before joining the museum's staff about 14 years ago, says "it's a blast to make things," especially big things. At the time of this interview, he was restoring the mold of the museum's whale shark, the world's largest fish.
Those AFSCME members are just a few of the "pros" who make the American Museum of Natural History a must-see for visitors to New York City. Says Beckett: "My members are part of the mosaic that makes this a Class A, world-respected institution."
Not profiled here — though certainly just as important to the museum's operation — are the many men and women who keep the floors spotless, help set up exhibits, operate the switchboard, safeguard the building and its contents, and perform many other essential tasks. As security guard Bob Halloran declares: "We are the day-to-day people, and the night-to-night people, who keep this place functioning."
