Peter Kuper's Monarch Butterflies Take Over the Natural History Museum

Cartoonist Peter Kuper has turned a corridor of the American Museum of Natural History into a wall-size rendition of the monarch butterfly migration. The exhibition, "Monarch's Journey," is on view at the museum's Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation in New York.

The subject is one of nature's big spectacles. Every fall, tens of millions of monarchs from southern Canada and the United States descend on the forests of Michoacán, Mexico. Branches sag and sometimes break under their combined weight. The source article notes the sight of so many twitching bodies covering the trees can be unnerving, even for people who like insects.

Kuper witnessed it himself. He visited the roosting monarchs in 2007, and the memory stuck. "I'm really glad they're not cockroaches or flying monkeys," he remembers thinking at the time. What lingered was the wonder of the butterflies rising through the air "like sparks from a fire."

"It's one of nature's grandest things," Kuper said.

How the exhibition works

Kuper scaled up his drawings into wall-size graphics, so walking the corridor mimics moving through the migration itself. Fans of his work will spot familiar material: drawings of a lone butterfly crossing hazardous landscapes — power plants, strip mines, the New Jersey Turnpike — rendered in steely shades of blue.

That lone butterfly comes from "Ruins," Kuper's 2015 graphic novel loosely based on the years his family spent in Oaxaca, Mexico. The show is in effect a retrospective thread pulled through that larger body of work.

Where the butterflies came from

Monarchs have served as metaphors for transformation and resilience in Kuper's work for well over a decade. They appear in:

• "Diario de Oaxaca" (2009), his illustrated account of two years living with his family in Oaxaca
• "Ruins" (2015), the graphic novel drawn from those experiences
• "Insectopolis" (2025), his homage to insects and the humans who champion them

"Monarch's Journey" is the first outing where this fixation gets a museum-scale canvas rather than the printed page.

What does this change for museumgoers?

The show signals how the American Museum of Natural History is using its newest building, the Gilder Center, to blur the line between science display and comics art. A corridor — normally pure circulation space — now carries an exhibition, which suggests the museum sees graphic storytelling as a legitimate vehicle for natural-history interpretation, not just decoration.

For Kuper, it marks a shift in medium. Wall-size graphics do something a book page can't: they put the visitor inside the scale of the migration, and inside the blue-grey industrial landscapes the monarchs must cross to reach Michoacán.

The exhibition also carries an implicit warning. By pairing the beauty of the mass migration with images of power plants and strip mines along the route, Kuper's drawings document the perils facing the species as much as its splendor — a tension that has run through his monarch imagery since the Oaxaca years.

The show sits within the museum's broader programming as part of a Fine Arts & Exhibits special section examining how art and museums are pushing boundaries. For a cartoonist best known for the printed page, "Monarch's Journey" is the largest physical statement yet of an obsession that began with a 2007 trip to Mexico's butterfly forests — and it points toward more commissions where comics artists handle museum walls directly.