Assemblage is an artistic process. In the visual arts, it consists of making three-dimensional or two-dimensional artistic compositions by putting together found objects. In literature, assemblage refers to a text "built primarily and explicitly from existing texts in order to solve a writing or communication problem in a new context".

The origin of the artform dates to the cubist constructions of Pablo Picasso c. 1912-1914. The origin of the word (in its artistic sense) can be traced back to the early 1950s, when Jean Dubuffet created a series of collages of butterfly wings, which he titled assemblages d'empreintes. However, both Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso had been working with found objects for many years prior to Dubuffet. They were not alone. Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin creates his "counter-reliefs" in the middle of 1910s. Alongside Tatlin, the earliest woman artist to try her hand at assemblage was Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the Dada Baroness. In addition, one of the earliest and most prolific was Louise Nevelson, who began creating her sculptures from found pieces of wood in the late 1930s.

Agathe Snow (née Aparru) (born 1976) is an artist based in New York.

Snow was born in Corsica. She works in a variety of media and has collaborated with artists including Alex Arcadia, Rita Ackermann, Michael Portnoy and Emily Sunblad. One of her best known endeavours was No Need To Worry, The Apocalypse Has Already Happened… at James Fuentes Gallery in 2007, in which Snow took the starting point of a recently flooded Manhattan as a conceit on which to base a five-week performance and gallery-wide installation, including a sculpture of the belly of a beached whale.

Snow married artist Dash Snow when he was 18 and she was 23. Dash Snow died on July 13, 2009; according to his New York Times obituary, their marriage had ended in divorce.

Snow's entry to the 2008 Whitney Biennial, to be held March 9-March 16 at the Park Avenue Armory anex of the biennial, is "Stamina: Gloria Et Patria," a week long dance-a-thon.

2008

Stamina: "Gloria Et Patria," a Dance-A-Thon produced as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial, at the Biennial's Park Avenue Armory annex.

Joseph Cornell (December 24, 1903 – December 29, 1972) was an American artist and sculptor, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker.

Joseph Cornell was born in Nyack, New York, to Joseph Cornell, a well-to-do designer and merchant of textiles, and Helen TenBroeck Storms Cornell, who had trained as a kindergarten teacher. The Cornells had four children: Joseph, Elizabeth (b. 1905), Helen (b. 1906), and Robert (b. 1910). Both parents came from socially prominent families of Dutch ancestry, long-established in New York State. Cornell's father died in 1917, leaving the family in strained circumstances. Following the elder Cornell's death, his wife and children moved to the borough of Queens in New York City. Cornell attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in the class of 1921, although he did not graduate.

Except for the three and a half years he spent at Phillips, he lived for most of his life in a small, wooden-frame house on Utopia Parkway in a working-class area of Flushing, along with his mother and his brother Robert, whom cerebral palsy had rendered physically challenged.