In Natural History Museum, Julian Whatley appropriates a luminous 1872 photograph of Yosemite Valley by Eadweard Muybridge to probe the darker contours of American myth-making, land use, and visual culture. The central landscape—viewed from the Merced River toward El Capitan and Bridal Veil Falls—is painted in atmospheric monochrome using lead white, Roman black, and charcoal. The surface reads as both homage and critique, echoing Muybridge’s reverence while exposing the aestheticization of conquest.

Overlaying the landscape is a hard-edged, three-color perspectival frame rendered in oil with a palette sourced from a 1933 Japanese Dictionary of Color Combinations: corinthian pink, cream yellow, and pale king’s blue. These hues suggest mid-century optimism, recalling the visual language of theme parks and roadside Americana—symbols of the “theme-park-ification” of wilderness.

Foregrounded on the proscenium plane is a taxidermied California grizzly bear, displayed in a vitrine. Extinct by the early 20th century, the bear stands as both icon and indictment—American wilderness reduced to a diorama. The painting asks: Is this how we wish to preserve nature? As memory? As artifact?

Part of Whatley’s Psychotropic Portals series and his broader Peripheral Space movement, Natural History Museum reframes the sublime as simulacrum, inviting viewers to reexamine how history, ecology, and entertainment intersect on the canvas of American land.