Before becoming an artist, Christopher Tennant was known as a journalist, editor, and writer. Does The Official Filthy Rich Handbook ring a bell? Well that was in 2008. In 2011, Tennant broke ground on a new passion, one that veered away from society writing completely. He began making Victorian-style dioramas and vitrines. Tennant’s magical spaces focus on the richly colored underwater world of sea fans, shells, and ocean arthropods, and also invoke feathered avian realms. Think Joseph Cornell meets Walton Ford. This exhibition, held at the Vanderbilt Museum—once the Long Island summer escape of William K. Vanderbilt II—places Tennant’s pieces among the museum’s marine and natural history collections, where they should feel right at home. —E.C.