Henry Darger - Collections and Exhibits

Collections and Exhibits

Darger’s works are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the American Folk Art Museum in New York, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Collection de l'art brut, the Walker Art Center, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of American Art, High Museum of Art, and the Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art in Villeneuve d'Ascq.

Darger’s art also has been featured in many notable museum exhibitions, including “The Unreality of Being” exhibit curated by Stephen Prokopoff. It was also seen in “Disasters of War” (P.S. 1, New York, 2000), where it was presented alongside prints from the famous Francisco de Goya series The Disasters of War and works derived from these by the British contemporary-art duo Jake and Dinos Chapman. Darger’s work has also been shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Setagaya Art Museum, and the Collection de l'art brut, La Maison Rouge, Museum Kunst Palast, Musée d’Art Moderne de Lille-Métropole, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

In 2008, the exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, titled "Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger," examined the influence of Darger's oeuvre on 11 artists, including Trenton Doyle Hancock, Robyn O'Neil, and Amy Cutler, who were responding not only to the aesthetic nature of Darger's mythic work — with its tales of good versus evil, its epic scope and complexity, and its transgressive undertone — but also to his driven work ethic and all-consuming devotion to artmaking.

Also in 2008, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago opened its permanent exhibit of the Henry Darger Room Collection, an installation that meticulously recreates the small northside Chicago apartment where Darger lived and made his art.