Sometimes, Kickstarter campaigns don’t meet their funding goals—but it’s not the end of the world! In this series, we explore what happens next.

Last spring, Jeanne Kelly, a visual artist with a background in forensic art, was finishing up her MFA at Parsons in New York. She found inspiration for her thesis among the 138 human skulls that make up the Hyrtl Collection at Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum. Jeanne wanted to find out what the former owners of those skulls, collected in the late 1800s, looked like. She selected eight individuals—including a tightrope walker who died of a broken neck, a famous Viennese prostitute who died of meningitis and [...]