Forensic Sculpture
FORENSIC SCULPTURE WORKSHOP
Forensic Sculpture
Forensic Sculpture is an annual workshop born out of a partnership between the New York Academy of Art and the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Each student receives a replica of the skull of a real unidentified person and, over the course of a week, reconstructs that person’s face in clay. The finished busts are photographed and circulated to law enforcement agencies and missing persons organizations. Nationally, thousands of sets of skeletal remains await identification.
Facial reconstruction is the point where the Academy’s training becomes forensically useful. Students here follow a rigorous course in anatomy and drawing from life, which teaches them to read the landscape of a skull and infer the features and flesh it once carried. Bradley J. Adams, director of forensic anthropology at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, describes clay reconstruction as the last-ditch effort, the method reached for once fingerprints, dental records and DNA have all failed. The workshop is taught by Joe Mullins, a forensic imaging specialist.
The pilot ran in 2015 and was the first time the Medical Examiner’s office had attempted this work with an art school. It produced eleven busts from New York City remains and one positive identification. Over the program’s first five years, at least four people were identified from reconstructions made by Academy students.
History of the Workshop
2015 — The pilot program, the first time the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had attempted the project with an art school. Eleven busts from New York City skeletal remains, and one positive identification.
2016 — Expanded beyond New York to cold cases from Delaware to California, including two nineteenth-century skulls from unknown soldiers killed during the Civil War and recovered from a battlefield.
2018 — A partnership with the Pima County, Arizona, Medical Examiner’s office to reconstruct the faces of eight unknown people who died crossing the desert at the US-Mexico border. From this year the Academy also worked with the technology company Cappasity, which donated its software to produce rotatable, zoomable 360-degree digitizations of each bust and widen the chances of recognition.
2019 — Alongside New York City and border cases, students reconstructed the face of Fortune, an enslaved African man from colonial-era Connecticut whose remains belong to the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury and have shaped what is known about slavery in New England before the Gradual Abolition Act of 1784.
2020 — The Royal Canadian Mounted Police brought fifteen Canadian cases from British Columbia and Nova Scotia, with remains discovered between 1972 and 2019 at sites ranging from a hiking trail to a beach, and including white, Indigenous and Black unknown Canadians. It is the largest initiative Canadian law enforcement has undertaken to identify unknown remains.
In the Studio