NYC art

New York art students mold clay into faces of city’s nameless

When Amy Pekal signed up for the New York Academy of Art to hone her skills as a sculptor, she never thought she would end up assisting in a police investigation.

Yet the 22-year-old student from Brooklyn and about a dozen of her classmates are doing just that by helping anthropologists at New York City's Office of Chief Medical Examiner identify nameless corpses that have gone unclaimed, sometimes for decades.

The students participated earlier this year in a five-day forensic sculpture workshop where they used clay to reconstruct faces from the remains of a few of . . .