New York Academy of Art

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 receive 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 is 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.