Oscar Bluemner, notes for a painting of Little Falls, New Jersey, 1917. Oscar Bluemner papers, 1886-1939, 1960. Archives of American Art. Smithsonian Institution.

From the sacred to the profane, the sublime to the mundane, handwritten or printed out, everybody makes lists. With time and perspective, the personal becomes historical, and such is the intriguing premise behind Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts and Other Artists’ Enumerations. at the Archives of American Art.

Archives specialist Mary Savig muses that the show “makes the ordinary extraordinary,” and this is in no small part due to the artistic temperament. The show’s rewards are not only historical, but aesthetic as well. Picasso’s hand-written recommendations for the 1913 Armory Show may lie firmly in the former camp, but Adolf Konrad’s packing list ca.1962-1963 is a wonderful graphic illustration, specific down to each matching sock, and there’s something hypnotic in the repetitive type of Grant “American Gothic” Wood’s otherwise sobering list of economic depressions. One list comes from Joseph Cornell, famed constructor of shadow-box dreamscapes, and subject of a Smithsonian Museum of American Art retrospective that was the must-see show of 2006. The document itemizes purchases Cornell made at a New York antiques show in 1957, and you wonder if “min. toy wagon, horse & driver, German ca. 1900” made it into any of his works. The abbreviated venue name at the top lends a sad note for aficionados of New York history: “Mad. Sq. Garden” refers to the third of four venues that went by that name, before the current one was built atop the site of the majestic old Pennsylvania Station.