Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) earned international recognition as a pioneering modern artist. This ambitious retrospective, the artist's first in twenty-five years, will be a major step in expanding the critical and public appreciation of him as an American art master. "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination" will feature 200 of his finest boxes, collages, objects, dossiers, films and graphic designs borrowed from an international array of public and private collections. Selections of his encyclopedic source materials from the museum's Joseph Cornell Study Center and the artist's papers from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art will be included also.

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, chief curator at the Peabody Essex Museum, is the guest curator for this exhibition that will be the culmination of thirty years of research on the artist. A widely published expert on Cornell, Hartigan is the museum's former chief curator and the founding curator of its Joseph Cornell Study Center. The exhibition will travel to the Peabody Essex Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2007.

Credit
“Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination” is co-organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass., with support from the Henry Luce Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts, as part of “American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius;” The Mnuchin Foundation; the Ridgestone Foundation; and James Corcoran, Los Angeles, and with the cooperation of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Richard and Joanne Brodie, the James F. Dicke Family, Tania G. and Thomas M. Evans Jr., and Shelby and Frederick Gans support the presentation at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Tour: Following its presentation at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the exhibition travels to the Peabody Essex Museum (April 28, 2007 – Aug. 19, 2007) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Oct. 6, 2007 – Jan. 6, 2008).

Learn more about Joseph Cornell:

Joseph Cornell Slide Show

Cornell artwork in SAAM's Collection

Cornell Biography

Archives of American Art Cornell Collection