For PEM curator, a love of keepsakes turns into a career

SALEM -- "Hitch your wagon to a star," Lynda Roscoe Hartigan's father was fond of telling her. "Then go drive the wagon."

Hartigan, now chief curator at the Peabody Essex Museum, has hitched much of her career in the art world to the work of the late Joseph Cornell, a true American original whose fanciful box constructions, collages, films, and other creations epitomize the possibilities of "found" art and assemblage. The founding curator of the Smithsonian's Joseph Cornell Study Center and author of several works about its namesake, Hartigan is the driving force behind "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination," a major retrospective that opened yesterday at the museum.

The curator, who rose from an internship at what is now the Smithsonian American Art Museum in the mid-1970s to its chief curatorial position in 1999, joined the Peabody Essex just as it was unveiling its $194 million transformation in 2003. While she is recognized as a specialist in folk, outsider, and African-American art, she remains as devoted to the enigmatic Cornell as she was as a graduate student. In those days she was an assistant at the Smithsonian to Walter Hopps, the curator who had given Cornell his first retrospective, at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967.

"I'd seen Cornell's work before, but not in my art history classes. He hadn't penetrated that way," said Hartigan recently, sitting in her office across the plaza from the Peabody Essex here. Gracious and mild-mannered, Hartigan exudes enthusiasm for her work. Above her desk hangs a piece of contemporary folk art by a Nevadan who goes by the nickname Slim, woven from strips of aluminum cans. It reads "Serendipity."

The curator's long infatuation with Cornell's meticulously crafted treasures seems almost inevitable when she describes herself as a schoolgirl, smitten with the gifts bestowed upon her, her brother, and their cousins by her maternal grandmother. Decorative keepsakes fashioned from common household items such as vases and coffee pots, they were examples of what folk-art collectors like to call "memory vessels."

"Most of the kids had a look of shock," she recalled, "like, 'Granny's gone around the bend.' But I thought these things were wonderful." Over the years Hartigan, who was born in 1950, has acquired all but one of the 18 objects from her relatives, most of whom were glad to find the gifts a sympathetic home.

"One has eluded me," she said with a smile, heaving a dramatic sigh.

If Cornell's art has natural appeal for curators and collectors -- the artist treated every scrap of ephemera as a potential museum piece -- it is also, Hartigan said, a perfect match for the "360-degree experience" at the heart of the Peabody Essex's renewed mission. Visitors to "Navigating the Imagination" will be taken on a journey through the artist's free-associating mind, with sections of the exhibition exploring his love of nature and stargazing, his famous idolization of untouchable female performers, and his ruminations on time and impermanence.

For the first time, Cornell's dreamlike film montages are being screened continuously alongside his assemblages. Part of the exhibition revisits his working environment in the cramped Queens home he shared with his mother and disabled brother; recordings made from Cornell's own beloved records are piped in.

"If you call it 'Navigating the Imagination,' " Hartigan joked, "you better well have taken an imaginative approach."

Interpretation, she said, is itself a creative act, and she hopes she has achieved some sense of Cornell's unique poetics with her vision for the exhibition.

"Cornell described himself as being 'anti-chronology,' " she said. "He had the mind of a browser. He was very oriented toward possibilities and relationships. I tried to take a cue from the artist.

"His mind was so far-ranging, it still astonishes me today. The fact that I had to learn [Heisenberg's] uncertainty principle, or about a certain ballerina or a piece by Schubert -- it's been a real adventure in the arts."

Hartigan's early immersion in Cornell prepared her well for other areas of expertise, said Betsy Broun, director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which co-organized "Navigating the Imagination" with the PEM and debuted the show last fall. The exhibition, which runs in Salem through Aug. 19, will travel later this year to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

"Lynda was almost single-handedly responsible for leading our museum in collecting modern folk art," said Broun. "A lot of us had to be persuaded it was an important thing to do. Lynda was a terrific advocate." Hartigan played a similar role in urging the museum to build its collection of African-American art.

Hartigan, said Broun, has an instinctive eye for the kind of untutored art that the museum world sometimes overlooks. "She's not a conventional-wisdom kind of person," Broun said.

Hartigan, who lives in Marblehead with her husband, their 18-year-old son, and two dogs in an old home that was once a summer camp, notes that Cornell, a lifelong New Yorker, had some of his only experience away from home in the greater Boston area. While attending Phillips Academy in Andover, where he was often sick to his stomach with anxiety, he spent two summers working in the textile mills of Lawrence.

He was also a devoted follower of Christian Science. "Mary Baker Eddy drew her ideas from a variety of sources -- philosophy, religion, art," said Hartigan. "I'm fairly certain how she wrote connected with his way of thinking. He had an uncanny need and desire to find a cohort."

Hartigan, evidently, has found hers.