Read in today's New York Times Science section about our upcoming exhibition "Exploratory Works: Drawings from the Department of Tropical Research Field". Link in our bio. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "[William] Beebe encouraged his staff to pursue their interests. Ms. Cooper was a staff artist who joined Beebe on seven voyages including a 1925 expedition from New York to the Galápagos aboard the Arcturus. She obsessed over painting snake eyes and scales, preferring live snakes over dead, because the color was more vibrant. The research team would bring specimens to the artists’ stations, or the artists would catch animals on their own. To paint the exotic living creatures, they had to improvise. “There’s no such thing as a school of snake artists, so when the problem of making a portrait of a snake presented itself I had to think up the technique for myself,” she wrote in The Atlantic Monthly in 1924. “I have had to discover — by the process of elimination mostly, I am afraid — which were ...