Joseph Cornell was a visual artist, filmmaker, and a pioneer of the assemblage genre. Influenced by Surrealism, he was also an accomplished collagist and experimental filmmaker. Mostly self-taught, Cornell’s early collages, box constructions, and experimental films were highly sophisticated, as well as romantic and lyrical. By 1940, his boxes contained found materials artfully arranged, then collaged and painted to suggest poetic associations with the arts, humanities, and sciences. Inspired by his everyday surroundings and encounters, Cornell said his work revealed “the beauty of the commonplace” – eschewing any theories of aesthetics that might constrain his creations. Over his lifetime, Cornell collected thousands of print media and three-dimensional ephemera from libraries, museums, theaters, book shops, and antique fairs across New York. Mining these empirical object archives, he seamlessly combined disparate images into poetic and surrealist compositions that marry fantasy and ubiquity.