Nikolai Jacobs, 34, never learned that in art school, but as part of the team that creates backgrounds for the exhibits at the Bronx Zoo, he has been charged with fashioning one for a major new exhibit of Komodo dragons and other monitor lizards that will open in September. He welded the steel frame he needed, sculptured giant blocks of polyurethane foam to create rocks and was about to airbrush the walls.
"At the moment, I'm doing the final prep before I start painting," he said.
While zoo visitors will most likely be paying attention to the three Komodo dragons (siblings, nearly six feet long and still growing) and smaller lizards on display, the animals' environments are works of art in themselves. Hand-sculptured and hand-painted, the backdrops are the result of months of labor by the zoo's exhibit specialists. There are fabricated sandstone cliffs from northern Australia, a rain forest from New Guinea (complete with waterfall) and pandanus trees emerging from that swampy billabong (an isolated pond that is left behind when a river changes course). The herpetologists may care for the stars of the exhibit, but the artists create the sets that show them off to maximum effect.
"These guys work in the shadows," said Jim Breheny, director of the zoo. "But they're the ones who sweat all the details and help us create the illusion of a naturalistic habitat. I don't think the visitor is necessarily conscious of the fact that there is lichen on the side of the tree. But it all goes into the impression one gets about the animal and where it lives."
The other day, Carolyn Fuchs, an exhibit specialist who studied fine arts at Connecticut College, was dabbing green and white paint — the lichen — on the trunk of an artificial buttress tree. She was putting the final touches on a display that will feature blue tree monitors, part of the supporting cast of the Komodo dragon exhibit.
Ms. Fuchs, 39, whose last major exhibit was "Madagascar," started work on her display last winter. After studying photographs of New Guinea, she carved the buttress tree out of polyurethane foam, along with strangler figs and large rocks. She covered them with fiberglass and then slathered on sculpturing epoxy, which allowed her to create ridges in the bark and lend texture to the vines. Now she was adding color. "It's almost like painting green clouds," she said of the puffy lichens taking form on the trunk.
The opening of the new exhibit, housed in the Zoo Center, a landmark Beaux-Arts building, will be the first time since the 1950s that the Bronx Zoo, which is run by the Wildlife Conservation Society, has put Komodo dragons on display. Komodos, the largest living species of lizard, which are native to several islands in Indonesia, can reach 10 feet in length and weigh up to 150 pounds. They are, in Mr. Breheny's words, "apex predators," capable of hunting deer and other hoofed animals. They have even been known to go after humans.
Komodo dragons, at first glance, conjure modern-day dinosaurs and are thus the stuff of children's dreams. Yet they also convey a conservation message that the society is eager to get across. "They are huge, impressive animals, and they are symbolic of some of the vulnerabilities that island species face," Mr. Breheny said. "Animals that live on islands are much more susceptible to threats and changes since they are kind of trapped. The islands where Komodos live have active volcanoes."
The main display area for the three Komodos will have ultraviolet lights, radiant heat panels and basking areas with temperatures up to 125 degrees. "A lot of what goes in here is about safety and making sure the Komodo dragons are comfortable," said Deborah Simon, an artist, as she held a miniature scale model of the space.
Ms. Simon and her colleagues in the zoo's Exhibition and Graphic Arts Department do more than create convincing exhibits. They once fashioned a prosthetic beak for an injured hornbill in Jungle World, using a specimen from the American Museum of Natural History for the mold. Another time, they were asked to craft protective rubber sheaths for the horns of an ibex after it had gored a baboon. "It's anything from making a drain cover that looks like a piece of rotted wood to developing intellectual toys for animals," said Ms. Simon, 42, who has a master's degree from the School of Visual Arts.
For Mr. Jacobs, who studied fine arts and history at Binghamton University and then specialized in metal smithing at Cranbrook Academy of Art, the most challenging part of his exhibit for the Mertens' water monitors was the "nesting box," a dry chamber hidden behind rocks that are submerged in water. The monitors will access the box through a hole at the top of the rocks. "The engineering for that was very complicated," he said.
Lauren Anker, an artist whose exhibit will shelter a half-dozen spiny-tailed monitors, is rendering the arid habitat in northern Australia that they prefer. She started by sculpturing sandstone rock formations, to which she recently began applying a series of red and brown washes. "This has been my favorite project," said Ms. Anker, 33, who studied fine arts and music at Purchase College. "It's rewarding to work on something from the beginning, to start with a three-quarter-inch scale model and realize an exhibit 11 feet high."
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