The Academy Blog

The New York Academy of Art is pleased to announce its 12^th annual Summer Exhibition, a juried show at Flowers Gallery featuring nearly 80 works of painting, drawing and sculpture by Academy alumni, faculty and students. The works were selected from over 650 submissions, a record number, by a jury comprised of Brent Beamon, Director of Flowers Gallery New York, Nicole Berry, Executive Director of The Armory Show, Matthew Flowers, Managing Director of Flowers Gallery, Alice Gray Stites, Museum Director and Chief Curator of 21c Museum Hotels, Ambre Kelly, co-founder of SPRING/BREAK Art Show, and Richard Vine, Managing Editor of Art in America.

During the summer of 2017 Yang Cao (MFA 2018), Herbert B. Danielson (MFA 2018), Shiqing Deng (MFA 2018), Zachary Lank (MFA 2018), Victoria Martinotti (MFA 2018), and Brendan Sullivan (MFA 2018) participated in a three-week Artist-in-Residence Program at the Terra Foundation for American Art-Europe. The foundation is located in the village of Giverny, France, next to Monet’s house and gardens. Each Giverny residency recipient also received an additional travel stipend from the Jason Talley (MFA 2008) Scholarship Fund.

The Academy’s Giverny Residency Program is made possible by the New York Academy Travel Fund and the Villore Foundation.

The New York Academy of Art’s Forensic Sculpture Workshop, created in 2015, is the result of a unique partnership between the Academy and the New York City Office of the Medical Examiner, in which art students used skulls from actual “cold cases” to recreate the faces of the victims, in the hope of identifying unknown persons.

For the week-long sculpture course, Academy students each receive a replica of the skull from a real unidentified body, and use their sculptural and artistic training to accurately reconstruct the face of the victim in clay, under the instruction of Joe Mullins, a forensic imaging specialist. Bradley J. Adams, the director of forensic anthropology for the Office of the New York City Medical Examiner, called clay facial reconstructions the “last-ditch effort” to identify unknown homicide victims, after methods such as fingerprinting, dental records and DNA testing fail to yield results. Nationally, thousands of skeletal remains await identification. The pilot program at the Academy in 2015 marked the first time the Office of the Medical Examiner had ever attempted this project with an art school, and resulted in 11 busts created from New York City skeletal remains and one positive identification. In 2016, the program was expanded from New York to include skulls from a variety of cold cases all over the country, from Delaware to California, and included two 19th-century skulls from unknown soldiers killed during the Civil War.

In 2018, the Academy expanded its scope.  In addition to working on selected remains from New York City, partnered with the Pima County, Arizona, Medical Examiner’s office to recreate the faces of 8 unknown migrants whose skeletal remains had been discovered in the desert. Each year hundreds of people die attempting to cross the US-Mexico border and in 2017, the death rate for migrants increased 17% according to the United Nations.

Starting in 2018, the Academy partnered with technology company Cappasity  to create 360-degree digitizations of the reconstructions. The high-definition digitizations, able to be rotated and zoomed, will greatly improve chances for possible identification and Cappasity has given use of its proprietary software pro bono to be used for this project.

For more information, contact Angharad Coates, Director of Communications for the New York Academy of Art atacoates@nyaa.edu, 212- 842 -5975

First day of class
(courtesy New York Academy of Art)

New York Academy of Art students at work
(courtesy New York Academy of Art)

Instructor Joe Mullins and student
(courtesy Emily J. Mullins)

Mexican ID photo, compared to New York Academy of Art facial forensic reconstruction
(courtesy Pima County, Arizona, medical examiner’s office)