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Nearly 50 Victorian hairworks from Leila’s Hair Museum are now part of Morbid Anatomy’s library collection in Brooklyn. The pieces include jewelry, memorial artworks and family-tree wreaths made from human hair. Morbid Anatomy’s collection and library pages describe access as free on weekends, but visitors should check the institution’s events page for current dates and hours before going.
What are Victorian hairworks?
Hairworks are keepsakes made with human hair, shaped or arranged into objects such as jewelry, wreaths and framed tableaux. In the collection now at Morbid Anatomy, hair appears in forms including butterflies, crowns and flowers. Some works are presented in lockets, necklaces and charms; others are displayed in shadowboxes alongside materials such as cotton, saint images, handwritten notes or baby shoes. Smithsonian Magazine describes examples from the installation.
There is no official taxonomy in the available descriptions, but the objects can be understood by their form, purpose and setting: wearable jewelry or a home display; a remembrance of someone living or dead; a personal keepsake or an artwork meant to be viewed. They are both records of relationships and examples of domestic craft.
Why did people make art and jewelry from hair?
Hairwork could preserve a tangible trace of a loved one, whether living or deceased. Its popularity in the 19th century overlapped with the growth of mourning customs and sentimental keepsakes. After Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria’s public mourning helped popularize mourning attire and funerary rituals; that context contributed to the period’s mourning culture, but it was not the sole origin or cause of hairwork.
Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy’s founder, told Artsy in 2018 that hair art “perfectly merges the fashion for mourning and sentimentality.” The quotation appears in Smithsonian Magazine’s account. The works also make visible the skill and labor involved in women’s domestic making, while reflecting how families remembered and valued their dead.
How the collection reached Morbid Anatomy
Leila Cohoon opened Leila’s Hair Museum in Independence, Missouri, in 1986, eventually assembling more than 3,000 pieces, according to Morbid Anatomy. After Cohoon died in 2024, her granddaughter Lindsay Evans helped rehome the collection and selected Morbid Anatomy as one of its homes. Other works went to institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The Associated Press reported that about 30 items went to the National Museum of Funeral History in 2025.
Evans told the Associated Press that visiting the collection’s new home made her feel close to her grandmother and helped her grieve. Her remarks are also reproduced in the Smithsonian report. The objects’ relocation is therefore not only a museum transfer: it keeps the works available for public viewing while preserving a connection to the person who spent decades collecting them.
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Where to see the hairworks in Brooklyn
The installation is at Morbid Anatomy’s Industry City location: 254 36th Street, Building 2, Suite C251, Brooklyn. An opening-party listing dates a preview to September 24, 2026; the institution’s September 27 open-house listing described the open house as the general public’s first opportunity to see the collection. Consult Morbid Anatomy’s collection page, library page and open-house listing for current visitor information; dates and hours can change.
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Morbid Anatomy presents the collection in the context of memento mori, women’s craft, memory, grief and mortality. Hair historian Karen Bachmann told NPR that objects like these were often put away and forgotten, but that seeing them valued in a collection means their makers and subjects are still remembered. Smithsonian Magazine reproduces her comments. Art Newspaper writer Eve M. Kahn has also observed that visitors may see their own reflections in the glass cases, visually entangled with the traces of the deceased—a fitting tension for objects made to keep the absent close.
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