Dozens of Curious Artworks Created With Woven Strands of Human Hair Come to New York’s Morbid Anatomy Library

So-called hairworks were popularized during the Victorian era as a means of grieving the deceased

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

October 2, 2026 12:00 p.m.

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A New York institution devoted wholly to dealings with death—everything from Latin American folklore to horror, atrocities and the occult—has announced an acquisition that is idiosyncratic even by its own high standards: dozens of pieces of human hair, clipped from the heads of the dying and deceased and braided into art.  

Put on long-term display last week at the Morbid Anatomy Library in Brooklyn, the roughly 50 new “hairworks” showcase the creative use of hair in 19th-century grieving practices, in which locks were often snipped, woven into artful objects and placed within all manner of mementos. 

The collection offers a wide range of examples: preserved hair braided into the shapes of butterflies, crowns, flowers and wreaths, and arranged within lockets, necklaces, charms and shadowboxes. Some hairworks are framed with accompaniments, including cotton balls, pictures of Christian saints, handwritten notes and even baby shoes.

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This unique practice was inspired in many ways by the Victorian era’s namesake, Queen Victoria, who popularized mourning attire and funerary rituals following the death of her husband, Prince Consort Albert, in 1861.  

Earning the nickname the “Widow of Windsor,” the queen established a formal mourning period for Albert that lasted until her own death, decades later, and prescribed other specific mourning periods for the deaths of relations of all kinds. A deceased brother or sister, for example, warranted four to six months of mourning, which included wearing black clothes for a time, before the eventual introduction of “a little white”; parents and children deserved a full year. Grieving second cousins and other distant kin was “not obligatory, but quite optional, and often not worn,” according to rules published in 1888.  

“This encouraged a fashion for mourning in popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic that lingered until the turn of the 20th century,” Joanna Ebenstein, the founder of Morbid Anatomy, told Artsy’s Allison Meier in 2018. “The Victorians were also famously sentimental. Hair art, which could be used to commemorate the living or dead beloved, perfectly merges the fashion for mourning and sentimentality.”

The new display in New York preserves the legacy of another unique institution, Leila’s Hair Museum, which closed for good last fall, following the death of its founder, hairdresser Leila Cahill.

Opened in 1986 in Independence, Missouri, the collection of more than 3,000 hairworks showcased the diversity and intricacies of hair as a creative medium. Victorian hair wreaths and reliquaries were put on view beside clippings from Queen Victoria, Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe and four presidents, reported KSNT’s Olivia Johnson in 2025. The institution was frequently listed among the country’s strangest museums to visit, for its appreciation of artifacts that others may have been inclined to discard.  

“These things got shoved in attics and forgotten about,” Karen Bachmann, a jewelry historian at the Pratt Institute, told NPR’s Julie Denesha in December. “People would look and go, ‘I don’t even know whose hair that is.’ But when you appreciate it and you see it in a collection such as this, they’re still remembered. They’re still valued.” 

Items from the vast Missouri-based collection have since been donated to major museums across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

“Every time I come here, I feel her here,” Lindsay Evans, Cahill’s granddaughter, told the Associated Press’ Heather Hollingsworth in October, after the museum’s closure. “This place is her. And so I feel like this process of rehoming her collection has helped me grieve her in a way that I didn’t even realize I really needed.” 

The artifacts’ arrival to New York was marked with a special ceremony, attended by Evans herself, devoted to “exploring memory, grief, and the strange beauty that emerges from our desire to keep the dead close,” according to a statement.  

“Museumgoers may find themselves disconcerted by their own reflections in the glass enclosures,” Eve M. Kahn writes for the Art Newspaper, “as if their images were entangled with the three-dimensional traces of the deceased.”

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.