Boxing Clever: A Centennial Re-Evaluation of Joseph Cornell
Centre for the Study of Surrealism and Its Legacies
University of Essex
Colchester, UK
17-19 September 2003
www.essex.ac.uk/sos/cornell.htm

The past decade has witnessed an extraordinary efflorescence of
interest in the work of the American artist Joseph Cornell, and the
publication of a host of key new critical, biographical, theoretical
and fictional texts that have transformed our understandings of this
prolific artist's life and artistic production.

To celebrate the centenary of Cornell's birth in 1903, "Boxing
Clever: A Centennial Re-evaluation of Joseph Cornell" is a three-day,
international and interdisciplinary conference, with an attached
exhibition of Cornell's magazine work and photographic images of the
artist.

Boxing Clever takes advantage of the recent interest in Cornell,
uniting for the first time a host of key poets, novelists,
photographers, art historians, and scholars from a variety of
disciplinary backgrounds, including Art, Art History, Art Criticism
and Journalism, English and American Studies, Visual Culture and Film
Studies to participate in a focused, three-day conversation which
will both revise and complicate existing ideas about Cornell's life
and work, and also open Cornell's work up to both a range of new
approaches and to a broader scholarly and popular audience for a new
millennium.

In order to (re)define Cornell's role in broader contexts including
the anthropology of travel, American Modernism, international
Surrealism, and the history and theory of twentieth-century film,
literature, and sculpture, the conference will feature papers from a
range of cutting-edge junior scholars, presenting work for the first
time from their doctoral and post-doctoral projects on Cornell,
alongside a wide range of internationally distinguished speakers from
a wide variety of disciplinary and professional backgrounds.
Boxing Clever will also, again for the first time, seek to complement
a large body of more traditional academic papers with more informal
evening events, including screenings and discussions of some of
Cornell's rarely-seen films, a collective conversation in the gallery
space, and readings by creative writers and poets who found
inspiration in Cornell's art.

For further details please contact: Emma Jenkins, Executive Officer,
Centre for the Study of Surrealism & Its Legacies,
ejenkinsessex.ac.uk. For more information about conference
registration log on to:
www.essex.ac.uk/sos/cornell.htm

Boxing Clever will include:

Academic Presentations by
-Jason Edwards, University of York
-Dickran Tashjian, University of California at Irvine
- Erika Doss, University of Colorado at Boulder
- Hugh Stevens,University College London
- Analisa Leppanen, University of California at Irvine
- Ariane Mildenberg, University of York
- Philip Cowell, Independent Scholar, London
- Stamatina Dimakopoulou, Independent Scholar, London
- Lynda Hartigan, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts
- Diana Davis, University of Texas at Austin
- James Housefield, Texas State University, San Marcos
- Julia Kelly, University of Manchester
- Lindsay Blair, Independent Scholar, Lochbroom, Scotland
- Anne Morra, Museum of Modern Art, NYC
- Melinda Barlow, University of Colorado at Boulder
- Joanna Roche, California State University at Fullerton
- Anna Dezeuze, University of Manchester
- Stephanie L. Taylor, New Mexico State University

Public Performances 'An Evening with Joseph Cornell' public
performance The ARCHIVE Collaborative, Anne Walsh & Chris Kubick Los
Angeles

'An Evening of Joseph Cornell's Films' public presentation, Robert
Haller, Director of the Collection, Anthology Film Archives, NYC

The Magical Worlds of Joseph Cornell cd-rom demonstration, Robert
Lehrman, collector & Chairman of the Board of the Hirshhorn Museum &
Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC with Cognitive Applications,
Brighton

"Knowing Joseph Cornell," Harry Roseman, Associate Professor of Art,
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY & Former Cornell Assistant

Gallery Exhibitions
A Selection of Cornells from the Private Collection of Robert Lehrman

Photographs of Joseph Cornell by Duane Michals & Harry Roseman

Joseph Cornell: Varia Printed Material & Other Ephemera from the
Collection of Dickran Tashjian

James E. Housefield
Visual Arts Editor, International Review of Modernism
http://www.modernism.wsu.edu/
Assistant Professor of the History of Art
Dept. of Art & Design
Southwest Texas State University (*Name changes to Texas State
University, 9/03)
San Marcos, TX 78666-4616
direct office tel. 512-245-3765
e-mail: jh48swt.edu
website: http://www.swt.edu/~jh48