SHEBOYGAN, Wisconsin (AP) — Bruce Conner's photo montage of a nuclear mushroom cloud wearing a military suit is a critique on nuclear production.

Martin Ramirez used paper bags and other available materials to create drawings with cutout pictures, possibly to hold on to aspects of a fractured identity.

Joseph Cornell was influenced by French symbolists and Gestalt psychologists, who compiled poetic fragments to alter emphasis and meaning, when he made his collage and boxed assemblage.

Those and nearly three dozen other artists are included in "Messages & Magic: 100 Years of Collage and Assemblage in American Art," which runs through January 25 at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

It includes the folk, self-taught and the academically trained.

"Though it's an important part of American art history, collage has often been overlooked," Ruth DeYoung Kohler, the center's director, said. "We hope this exhibition leaves visitors with the sense that when pieces of our shared culture are combined, something truly magical occurs."

Curator Leslie Umberger said there have been other exhibitions on the topic, but they don't acknowledge collage as something that had roots before 1912 — when the term collage was coined as cubist artists Pablo Picasso and George Braque began to work in it.

"We are very interested in ... stretching those boundaries and say, 'Yes this particular person maybe wasn't thinking along those same lines but the endeavor was certainly about the same thing,"' Umberger said.

Gretchen Bierbaum, founder of the National Collage Society based in Hudson, Ohio, said the "100 years" designation may be technically accurate but she called it a stretch.

She noted the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, N.Y., organized a 2003 traveling collage exhibition that had works from 1950 to 2002.

Collage is the only new well-defined, fine-art medium of the 20th century and it was only first recognized widely this century, as demonstrated by these recent exhibitions, Bierbaum said.

Despite the exhibition's title, she gave organizers credit for doing their homework.

"The thing I'm just happy about is people are paying attention to collage because it's almost 100 years old and people have started to misuse the term collage. It's starting to be a generic term."

The earliest work, from 1908, is by Charles A. A. Dellschau, who produced collages with newspaper clippings and painted images that celebrated the aviation age.

Conner, who died this summer, was also known for his film work, splicing together bits of still photography, and new and found footage, and adding music.

There are three Ramirez pieces. In one untitled work, a hand-drawn train dominates the collage on large brown paper with a cutout of a woman from a Breck shampoo ad who resembles one of his daughters.

He left Mexico in 1925 and worked on the rails in California for a period but never returned to his family.

He spent most of his time after 1931 institutionalized in California mental hospitals, diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic.

"This was a way of sorts to hold on to that family and that identity and retain part of his Mexican culture in the only way he knew how," Umberger said.

Three pieces by Cornell are featured, including 1954's "Madame Mallarme's Fan" with a Nautilus shell, a leaf and a constellation with a sunset or sunrise on a desert backdrop.

Although inspired by the surrealist movement, he never claimed to be part of it.