SALEM, MA.- The Peabody Essex Museum will feature Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination, on view April 28, 2007—August 19, 2007. Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination is the first major retrospective of the artist’s work in more than 26 years. Featuring 180 works, the PEM venue is the largest of this touring exhibition which includes the artist’s finest box constructions, collages, dossiers, films and graphic designs from public and private collections––more than 30 on public view for the first time. Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, chief curator of the Peabody Essex Museum, and a widely published scholar on Cornell, is curator of the exhibition. Co-organized by the Peabody Essex Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Navigating the Imagination presents new insights into Cornell’s career, illuminating the richness of the ideas he explored across all media.

The exhibitionis organized thematically to suggest for the first time Cornell’s interpretation of the imagination as a metaphorical “echo chamber” or “mirror of the mind.” Unlike previous chronological presentations, the exhibition mingles Cornell’s series and media across four decades of his career to convey the conceptual and formal cohesiveness of his body of work. This approach emphasizes Cornell’s perception of art as a means of creating and communicating connections and possibilities through repetition and variation. The exhibition also is the first time that his films and a greater range of his collages are being shown in the company of the box constructions for which he is best known.

Joseph Cornell’s work often is associated with Surrealism. However, as Hartigan reveals, this self-taught, yet amazingly sophisticated artist went beyond ascribed art categories by mingling the techniques of painting, collaging, drawing, and woodworking and blurring the distinctions between the fine and popular arts. He was an American master who defined working with found materials as a new arena for making modern sculpture and whose impact has been felt by artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, experimental filmmakers Rudy Burckhardt and Stan Brakhage, and writers Octavio Paz and Charles Simic, among many others.

Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination is accompanied by a catalogue written by Hartigan (Yale University Press, spring 2007). The exhibition travels to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in autumn 2007. Curator: Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, chief curator, Peabody Essex Museum.