Museum Exhibition Review Essay

The American Museum of Folk Art now offers a paradoxical opportunity to find oneself into a parallel world, the one created in the head and by the hands of Henry Darger, a self taught artist whose impact on many contemporary artists is incontestable. Visiting the American Folk Art Museum’s exhibition “Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger” is like getting a cameo in “Being Henry Darger” movie for the time of the visit.

Darger is called one of the most significant artists of the XX century. His epic masterpiece, 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, supported by the three hundred watercolor and collage paintings, inspired numerous young talented artists to create for the sake of art and express ones feelings and ideas through the artwork. Darger is believed to have unintentionally become the founder of the Dargerism movement standing for the “all-consuming devotion to artmaking”, according to the curator of the exhibition, Brooke Davis Anderson.