Curated by Jasper Sharp and Sarah Lea

Joseph Cornell was famously bound to his tiny home in Queens, a caregiver for his family. As it turns out, many of his assembled boxes haven’t done much traveling either, since they’ve remained for the most part in American collections. But this summer, Cornell’s work will venture abroad to the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where the curators will showcase the myriad ways in which Cornell’s intimate assemblages explored the world by way of imagery. Eighty-odd works will be shown—including box constructions, collages, and films; viewers will be able to wander and wend through the many fragments of Cornell’s itinerant imagination: from found souvenir photography and pictorial specimens of exotic fauna to celestial maps that suggest both a dream destination and a guide for navigating elsewhere. Travels to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Oct. 20, 2015–Jan. 10, 2016.

— Sarah K. Rich