How Your World Works

The preparators of the American Museum of Natural History's Exhibitions Department are artists and craftsmen by trade who become scientists by practice as they build the museum's famed traveling exhibitions. In what may be the coolest workshop in the whole of New York City, they use wood, metal, epoxy, paint, and hundred-year-old death masks to build dioramas that transport visitors to settings all over the natural world. As they undertake final preparations for their latest exhibition, Cuba!, which opens November 21, we visit the workshop to see what they've built.