Small World presents works by a group of artists who use the language of dioramas-small- or full-scale models of real or imaginary environments as a vehicle for artistic expression. The traveling exhibition and accompanying catalogue feature works by artists Michael Ashkin, Helen Cohen, Liz Craft, Mark Dion, Bridget and Tina Marrin, Tony Matelli, Alexis Rockman, Clara Williams (USA); Thomas Demand (Germany); Mat Collishaw, Nils Norman (England); and Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japan). Inspired by a variety of sources including museum displays, stage sets, and miniature models, these artists work in both two and three dimensions. They create and analyze dioramas, exploring the ways we know and understand the world.

The diorama is, like its relative the panorama, an eighteenth-century innovation, a pre-cinematic form of entertainment and education intended to provide views of significant places and events. First used in 1821 by L.J.M. Daguerre and Charles Bouton to describe large, hyperrealistic scenes painted on two sides of translucent fabric that produced changing imagery when illuminated, the word "diorama" stems from the Greek dia (through) and horama (to see). Since this early use, three-dimensional models have become a means for different fields-artistic and otherwise-to convey knowledge and give form to ideas. The urge to create small worlds, however, is primordial. Humans seem genetically engineered to want to simulate the terrain of life and to see the world in miniature, or preserved as if in a time capsule. In dioramas, the concrete and the imaginary, the authentic and the artificial become magically intertwined. Writing about miniaturization in her book On Longing (Duke University Press, 1993), critic Susan Stewart notes that the atmosphere in a diorama is charged; mood and time are crystallized, and the viewer is given the extraordinary opportunity to step outside of his or her time and place to view life.