Lynda Hartigan

Thursday, April 10, 2008, 5:30pm Ι Center for Creative Photography 108

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan is Chief Curator of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, where she oversees the curatorial, publications, registration, collection management, and conservation programs and is a member of the museum’s senior management team. Prior to joining PEM in 2003, she was Chief Curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her research specialties in modern art, Joseph Cornell, American folk and outsider art, and African-American art have yielded numerous widely recognized exhibitions and publications since the mid-1970s.

As the founding curator of the Joseph Cornell Study Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1978, Hartigan organized and administered this repository of the artist’s voluminous studio effects, library, and artworks for use by scholarly and general audiences until 2003. In 1980 she wrote the first biography of Joseph Cornell for Kynaston McShine, ed., Joseph Cornell, published on the occasion of the artist’s retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art. Two years later she organized the exhibition “Joseph Cornell: An Exploration of Sources” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Hartigan’s essay “Joseph Cornell’s Explorations: Art on File” appeared in Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp…in Resonance, published in conjunction with the exhibition that she and a team of curators organized for The Menil Collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1998. She was the scholarly advisor to and principal author for the book Joseph Cornell: ShadowPlay/Eterniday and its companion DVD, The Magical Worlds of Joseph Cornell, published in 2003 in collaboration with the Voyager Foundation and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Most recently, Hartigan has curated the traveling retrospective “Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination,” coorganized by the Peabody Essex Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, November 2006–January 2008. She is the author of the catalogue Imagine Joseph Cornell, published for PEM’s presentation of the show, and of the book Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination, published by Yale University Press in Fall 2007.