Joseph Cornell Study Center

An Ontological Museum Website

Joseph Cornell Boxes

This website is an homage to Joseph Cornell and a place where we will be showing examples of assemblage art in the Ontological Museum’s permanent collection by contemporary artists.

We have quite a few specimens of box assemblage in the collection. Many were gathered from artists from previous exhibitions and we believe this will be a good venue to show off the highlights from this collection.

To the right are images of Cornell’s work that have been found on the internet and make a good context for showing contemporary examples of assemblage art.

In the Fine Arts arena, Picasso is credited with working with assemblage but assemblage quickly gained traction through a number of artists such as Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, the Surrealists and many other well known artists from the 20th Century.

Joseph Cornell, a reclusive American artist, was influenced by the Surrealists and theater and the movies. His work is wistful and romanic and has been an enduring inspiration to many artists working today in the field of assemblage.

The Ontological Museum is a grand assemblage project.
We thank all the artists who have generously contributed to it.

Works from the Ontological Museum’s Permanent collection

The Collection

The collection contains traditional box assemblage art as well as Fluxus boxes and assemblage works from contemporary artists. We will also show some of our collection of Assemblings which are collections of artists’ objects created as a limited collective publication.