Natural history museums are motionless dioramas of the natural world, frozen in silent stillness, that allow us to glimpse an isolated moment in the past from the safe and sterile distance of the present. But these taxidermal tableaus never allow us to truly connect with the animals posed within them, or the world in which they lived. They exist just as lifeless echoes of another place and time.

This book is a collection of drawings inspired by mammals found on display at various natural history museums and science institutes throughout the country. It’s an effort to free those animals from the fixed stares and grotesque smiles with which they’ve been immortalized, and to recapture, through color and gestural marks, a semblance of the life and personality that have been removed by death and preservation.

Drawings of Dead Stuff From Museums is a book featuring drawings of unique animals from the Yale Peabody Museum, the Wagner Free Institute of Science, and Natural History Museums of Los Angeles to name just a few. Each book is a 8.5 x 8.5 inch soft cover open edition book.