Collection: Henry Darger

Henry Darger (1892–1973) worked in near-total isolation in Chicago for most of his adult life, employed as a hospital janitor and known to almost no one as an artist. After his death, his landlord discovered his room contained one of the most extraordinary private archives in twentieth-century art: the 15,145-page illustrated novel In the Realms of the Unreal, hundreds of large-scale watercolour and collage works depicting the Vivian Girls in battle against adult oppressors, and a second manuscript of nearly 5,000 pages.

Darger’s work entered public view through a sequence of transfers — from room to archive, archive to gallery, gallery to museum, museum to documentary, documentary to poster — each stage reframing the material and expanding its audience. The American Folk Art Museum in New York became a key institutional site for his work; Jessica Yu’s 2004 documentary In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger brought his story into cinema.

Items here include posters, printed matter, and ephemera connected to Darger’s work and its reception.