Paula Rego, John Ruskin, Donald Judd, Lucian Freud, Hokusai, and, yes, Leonardo da Vinci.
Henry Darger
A Gallery’s Eight Decades of Artistic Independence
Now celebrating its 80th anniversary, Manhattan’s Galerie St. Etienne brings a scholarly approach to a uniquely diverse lineup.
The Visible Language of Outsider Art
Vestiges & Verse: Notes from the Newfangled Epic, an exhibition of illustrated texts by self-taught artists, feels so intimate that it seems to enter the creative process itself.
The Sexual Ambiguity of Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls
An exhibition sheds new light on the Chicago recluse’s most provocative images.
Today Is Henry Darger Day in Chicago
On what would be the self-taught artist’s 125th birthday, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art is holding a daylong celebration formally recognized by the mayor of Chicago.
In Switzerland, Art Brut Goes Back to Its Roots
LAUSANNE, Switzerland — The roots of art brut, as a field of research, may go back a century or more, effectively (if perhaps unwittingly) tracing the evolution of this unusual art genre in parallel with but separate from that of modern art.
Bodies at War: ‘Soldier, Spectre, Shaman’ at MoMA
World War II signaled the death of figurative art, or so the High Modernist narrative once contended.
The Radical Ambiguity of Henry Darger
PARIS — I first encountered Henry Darger’s doggedly private, colored drawings depicting his opulent fantasy world at the 1997 The Unreality Of Being show at the Museum of American Folk Art.
A Play for the Enigmatic Henry Darger
An independent theater in Chicago is adapting Henry Darger’s life into a play. The effort, currently accepting funds on Indiegogo, aims to draw attention to the life of the prolific outsider artist and creator of the illustrated tale of the “Vivian Girls,” a man whose own story has thus far been relegated to the margins.
Going Inside: Outsider Art Fair 2014
After this year’s Outsider Art Fair, a Frieze Week corollary held at 548 West 22nd Street in Chelsea, closed on Sunday, the artist Mark Flood began taking over the space for an “Insider Art Fair” that opens today.
On Henry Darger’s 15,000-Page Novel
Although he traced and painted and wrote in obscurity until the day he died, Henry Darger is, today, probably the best-known outsider artist in the world. In the past decade or so, the small space of his one-room Chicago apartment ceded to the spacious galleries of museums and art fairs, and Henry Darger — a man who kept mostly to himself, not quite reclusive but not incredibly social either — became the poster boy of outsider art.
What Does “Outsider Artist” Even Mean?
A post by my fellow editor Kyle Chayka got me thinking about the “outsider artist” designation and the different ways people define it.