Stuffed Animals, Sacred Rituals: How Young Taxidermists Are Making Death Mean Something Again

There's a crow on Marisol Vega's workbench that has been dead for three weeks, and she talks to it like an old friend.

"People think that's weird," says Vega, a 26-year-old self-taught taxidermist and installation artist based in Oakland. "But I think it's weirder to pretend the animal was never alive in the first place. That's what the funeral industry does. That's what most of our culture does. We erase the fact that something lived and died and mattered."

Vega is part of a loose but growing movement of young Americans — disproportionately queer, disproportionately BIPOC, overwhelmingly online — who are picking up scalpels, wire forms, and tanning solutions and asking a question the mainstream hasn't wanted to touch: what do we owe the dead, animal or otherwise?

The answer, increasingly, is art.

From Dusty Dioramas to Dinner Table Conversations

For most of the 20th century, taxidermy existed in two uncomfortable registers in the American imagination. There was the trophy mount — a buck's head on a hunter's wall, a symbol of conquest — and there was the natural history museum diorama, scientifically valuable but emotionally inert, everything arranged to look alive while feeling profoundly, deliberately dead.

Neither version invited you to feel anything complicated.

What's happening now is different. The new taxidermy isn't trying to simulate life. It's trying to honor death — and in doing so, drag our collective avoidance of mortality into the light.

Jordan Okafor, a 29-year-old Nigerian American artist and naturalist in Chicago, started doing taxidermy in 2019 after his grandmother died and he found himself furious at the sterility of the funeral home experience. "Everything was about making her look like she wasn't gone," he says. "The makeup, the lighting, the way no one said the word 'dead.' I kept thinking — she was a person. This was her body. Why are we pretending otherwise?"

He started working with roadkill and ethically sourced specimens, creating pieces that deliberately show the seams — stitching left visible, glass eyes slightly mismatched, fur ruffled rather than smoothed. "I want you to see the work," he says. "I want you to know something died and someone cared enough to do something with that."

Queerness, Animality, and the Body That Won't Behave

It's not a coincidence that so many of the people reinventing taxidermy identify as queer. There's a long, tangled history between queerness and the body — who gets to inhabit one, how society polices them, what happens when a body refuses to conform to expected categories.

Taxidermy, at its most transgressive, is about exactly that: a body that defies categorization. It is neither alive nor conventionally dead. It occupies a liminal space that the culture has always found uncomfortable.

"Queerness taught me to sit with ambiguity," says Dani Lark, a 24-year-old trans taxidermist and educator in Portland who runs community workshops focused on roadkill recovery and ethical sourcing. "A preserved animal isn't pretending to be alive. It's something else entirely. I find that really honest, actually."

Lark's work often incorporates florals, gemstones, and fiber arts — elements coded feminine in ways that clash deliberately with taxidermy's historically masculine, hunting-culture associations. The effect is disorienting in the best way. A fox draped in dried lavender and hand-stitched ribbon doesn't read as trophy. It reads as grief made visible.

"I'm not interested in domination," Lark says. "I'm interested in remembrance."

Conservation, Capitalism, and the Roadkill Economy

There's also a sharp ecological edge to what these artists are doing, and they're not shy about naming it.

The United States loses an estimated one million animals to vehicle collisions every single day. Most of those bodies are scraped off asphalt and forgotten. The new taxidermists see that as both a tragedy and a resource — not in a cold, extractive sense, but in the way that Indigenous traditions of using every part of an animal have always understood utility as a form of respect.

"We have this insane relationship with animal death in this country," says Vega. "We eat billions of animals a year and we've built an entire industrial system so we never have to see any of it. We hit animals with our cars constantly and we look away. And then we wonder why we're so disconnected from nature, from our own mortality, from each other."

For many in this community, taxidermy is explicitly anti-capitalist in its logic. It refuses disposability. It insists that the thing that died had value — not market value, but something harder to quantify.

Okafor has started selling his pieces, but he's deliberate about pricing and access. "I don't want this to be another thing only rich people can have," he says. "I do sliding scale commissions. I teach workshops for free in my neighborhood. The point isn't to make a luxury object. The point is to make people stop and think."

The Spiritual Dimension Nobody Talks About

Ask any of these artists about the spiritual side of their practice and watch them light up — and then watch them hesitate, because American culture doesn't have great language for what they're describing.

It's not religion, exactly. It's closer to what some scholars call "animism" — a recognition that the non-human world has its own kind of significance, its own claim on our attention and care. It's the thing your grandparents might have called "paying respects," applied to a sparrow as readily as a person.

"There's a ritual quality to the work," says Lark. "You're spending hours with this animal. You learn its body intimately. You make decisions about how it will be remembered. That's not nothing. That's actually a lot."

Vega describes a kind of meditative state she enters during the process — something she struggled to find after her own father died three years ago. "The funeral home gave us forty-five minutes," she says. "Forty-five minutes to say goodbye to my dad. Taxidermy gave me back the idea that we're allowed to take time with death. We're allowed to sit with it."

What Comes Next

The taxidermy renaissance isn't going mainstream anytime soon — and honestly, the people doing it seem fine with that. There are legal gray areas around transporting certain specimens, a steep learning curve, and a cultural squeamishness that isn't going anywhere fast. This will probably always be a niche.

But niche, in 2024, has reach. Lark's TikTok tutorials have pulled in hundreds of thousands of views. Okafor's gallery show in Pilsen last spring sold out. Online communities dedicated to ethical taxidermy have exploded in the last three years, full of young people trading sourcing tips, technique videos, and — maybe most importantly — honest conversations about death that they can't seem to have anywhere else.

"People are hungry for this," Vega says, smoothing a feather on the crow that will, in a few weeks, become something new. "They don't know they're hungry for it until they see it. And then something opens up."

She sets down her tools and looks at the bird for a long moment.

"Death is not the problem. Silence is the problem."

She picks the tools back up. There is work to do.