This world renowned annual workshop is the result of a unique program developed by the Academy and the New York City Office of the Chief 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.
The New York Academy of Art is the national leader in teaching contemporary figurative art and its students follow a rigorous technical course of anatomical training and drawing from life. This specific artistic instruction allows Academy students to actively interpret the landscape of a skull and skillfully portray features and flesh. Fifteen students each received a replica of the skull from a real unidentified body and used their sculptural and artistic training to accurately reconstruct the face of the victim in clay.
The workshop was taught by Joe Mullins, a forensic imaging specialist. Bradley J. Adams, the director of forensic anthropology for the Office of the City Medical Examiner, has called clay facial reconstructions the “last-ditch effort” to identify unknown persons, after methods such as fingerprinting, dental records and DNA testing fail to yield results. When the reconstructions are completed, they are photographed and shared widely with law enforcement and missing persons organizations. Over the five years of the program, at least 4 positive identifications have been made from reconstructions made by Academy students.
In 2020, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police asked the Academy if their students could work on 15 Canadian cases from British Columbia and Nova Scotia. Discoveries of the remains date from 1972 to 2019, with discovery sites ranging from a hiking trail to washed ashore on a beach, and include white, indigenous and Black unknown Canadians. The partnership with the New York Academy of Art is the single largest initiative undertaken by law enforcement in Canada to identify unknown remains.
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History of the Forensic Sculpture Workshop
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 and recovered from a battlefield.
In 2018, the Academy partnered with the Pima County, Arizona, Medical Examiner’s office to recreate the faces of 8 unknown border crossers whose skeletal remains had been discovered in the desert.
In 2019, in addition to both New York City cold cases and border migrant cases, the reconstructions included the face of an enslaved African man from colonial-era Connecticut, the renowned “Fortune” belonging to Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, whose preserved remains have provided information about the history of slavery in New England prior to 1800.