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Outbyte PC Repair FREEClear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEFix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Nearly 50 Victorian-era artworks made from human hair have been installed at Morbid Anatomy in Brooklyn. The works—jewelry, memorial pieces and family-tree wreaths—were donated from Leila Cohoon’s former Leila’s Hair Museum in Missouri. The installation offers a rare chance to see a personal keepsake tradition that joined craft, memory and mourning.
What is Victorian hairwork?
Hairwork is art made by arranging, weaving or incorporating human hair into keepsakes and decorative objects. At Morbid Anatomy, the donated works include family-tree wreaths, jewelry and memorial artworks. Examples described by Smithsonian Magazine take the forms of butterflies, crowns, flowers and wreaths, displayed in lockets, necklaces, charms and shadowboxes. Some incorporate cotton, saint images, handwritten notes or baby shoes.
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There is no official taxonomy for the objects, but their differences are easy to see across three dimensions:
- Form: wearable jewelry, wreaths or framed tableaux.
- Purpose: commemoration of someone living or dead.
- Setting: a keepsake worn on the body or an artwork displayed at home.
Why make jewelry and art from human hair?
Hair offered a tangible link to a person: a small part of someone that could be kept close, arranged into an image or preserved after death. These works are both memorial objects and evidence of domestic craft, preserving traces of relationships while reflecting the labor and skill often associated with women’s making.
Hairwork belonged to a broader culture of keepsakes and mourning; the available accounts do not establish that the practice began in the Victorian era or with Queen Victoria. Her public mourning after Prince Albert died in 1861 helped popularize mourning culture, but it was one influence among others. Joanna Ebenstein, founder of Morbid Anatomy, described hair art as combining the era’s mourning fashion and sentimentality: it could commemorate “the living or dead beloved.” Smithsonian Magazine quotes her from a 2018 Artsy interview.
The objects also show how remembrance can change when a keepsake leaves a family home. Jewelry historian Karen Bachmann told NPR that such pieces were sometimes forgotten in attics, and that seeing them valued in a collection can mean their makers and subjects are “still remembered.” Her remarks are reproduced in the Smithsonian report.
How Leila Cohoon’s collection came to Brooklyn
Leila Cohoon opened Leila’s Hair Museum in Independence, Missouri, in 1986 and built a collection of more than 3,000 pieces, according to Morbid Anatomy. After Cohoon died in 2024, her granddaughter Lindsay Evans helped rehome the collection. Morbid Anatomy received nearly 50 works; other objects went to institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The Associated Press also reported that about 30 items went to the National Museum of Funeral History in 2025.
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Evans told the Associated Press that returning to Morbid Anatomy made her feel her grandmother’s presence and that rehoming the collection helped her grieve. The Smithsonian report reproduces those remarks. The donation therefore serves as more than a transfer of objects: it gives a family collection a public setting while keeping its connection to Cohoon visible.
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Where to see the hairworks
The installation is at Morbid Anatomy, 254 36th Street, Building 2, Suite C251, Brooklyn, New York. The institution’s opening-party listing dates a preview to September 24, 2026; its open-house listing identifies the general public’s first opportunity to see the collection as September 27, 2026. Morbid Anatomy describes access to the collection and library as free and generally available on weekends, but schedules can change. Check the current collection page, library page and open-house listing for specific dates and hours before visiting.
The presentation invites close looking as well as historical curiosity. Art Newspaper writer Eve M. Kahn noted that viewers may see their own reflections in display glass as though entangled with traces of the deceased; the Smithsonian report quotes her description. At Morbid Anatomy, the works can be approached at once as intricate objects, family mementos and reminders of how people make memory material.
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