Things To Do: Dargerism at the American Folk Art Museum

Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger
American Folk Art Museum
45 West 53rd St., New York
April 15 – September 21, 2008
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American artist Henry Darger's opus, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, established his reputation in the art world, thanks to its more than 300 absorbing and detailed watercolor and collage paintings, as well as its written story. The work of the self-taught Darger was discovered by his landlords shortly before his death. His outsider epic has loomed large in film, whether it's Jessica Yu's documentary In the Realms of the Unreal or 2005's Junebug, which featured a Darger doppleganger. This exhibit explores Darger's idiosyncratic influence on contemporary artists, and the results are sure to take the artist's chief obsessions—good and evil, brave children, religious strife—and explore them through a fascinating lens.