The New York Academy of Art will host an exhibition of clay busts created in its “Forensic Sculpture” workshop from April 18 – May 5. This nationally-acclaimed annual workshop is the result of a unique partnership between 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.
Fourteen 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 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.
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 homicide victims, after methods such as fingerprinting, dental records and DNA testing fail to yield results.
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 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 include the face of 19th century teenage female victim of meningitis, created in partnership with the Mutter Museum of Medical History in Philadelphia, and 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 the Gradual Abolition Act of 1784.
For more information, contact Angharad Coates, Director of Communications for the New York Academy of Art at acoates@nyaa.edu, 212- 842 -5975
Forensic Sculpture Reconstructions