Tag Archives: American Folk Art Museum

15,145 Pages. No, I’m not talking about Dickens or Proust.

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15, 145 pages. Several hundred drawings. It was hardly what the landlords of Henry Darger expected to find in their deceased tenant’s room. Darger had an uneventful life of poverty and janitorial work, so his long novel and extremely detailed drawings charting the wild adventures of his favorite characters, the Vivian girls, were quite the surprise. I watched the awesome PBS documentary “In the Realms of the Unreal,” which charts the biography of Henry Darger and how his life affected his writings and drawings.

Among his various works, including a biography, he is famous for the 15,145-page, single-spaced fantasy manuscript called 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, along with several hundred drawings and watercolor paintings illustrating the story. Darger’s work has become one of the most celebrated examples of outsider art. It shows the power of imagination and obsessiveness over the humblest circumstances. 


To my joy, I was walking by the American Folk Art Museum yesterday, and saw that they are currently showing an exhibition called Up Close: Henry Darger and Coloring Books. What luck!

FREE Guggenhiem Today

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In honor of its 50th anniversary, the Guggenheim New York is free today. Now if this where another major New York institution this would not be as cool, because most museums have free nights once a week. The Guggenheim is free one Saturday a month from 5:45 pm to 7:45 pm (ahem, lame).

A large-scale Kandinsky exhibition is up now, which combined with Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture, makes for an excellent museum day.I’m plotting how I can get there and back on my lunch hour.
ADDENDUM: 1:43 pm-I have just returned to my desk from the Guggenheim. The line winds out the door and down the block from 5th Avenue to Madison! No Kandinsky for me today.

Kara Walker: Pony tricks or Variations?

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Kara Walker‘s work is rarely compared to Cindy Sherman‘s, but they share a similarity I’m not sure I like. ‘One trick pony’ is a hackneyed enough phrase, but that is what I called Cindy Sherman’s work in another post. Her images of herself in costume take on different guises, but ultimately they are all photos of Sherman as someone else. Kara Walker does not take photographs and does not use her own image, but instead takes the history of the South and gives it a modern, darker spin dealing with race and sexuality.

Walker’s body of work is more varied than Sherman’s. In her graphic depictions of gender and racial inequalities,Walker is recognized by her Victorian-style silhouettes but she has also used watercolors, video, painting, and shadow puppets. Her works range from letter sized to room sized. While often working in stark black on white, she also uses color.


In the autumn of 2007, Walker’s work not only opened in galleries in Manhattan, but she had a solo show at the Whitney and a self-curated show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Seeing all her work was a treat. All the more reason why I regret drawing this comparison, but she and Sherman are both one trick ponies.


Her transgressive images of black stereotypes tell a part of Southern history that deserves to be told, but by now I think she has exhausted that combination of style and subject. By the time I had seen all of her work in its many forms and shows, I felt they were variations on a theme.

Variations on a theme are certainly a way of exploring a topic, but I’m not sure that Walker is saying something new. As I honestly enjoy her work ( and Sherman’s for that matter), maybe I’m being too harsh a judge. I just learned the value of such variations at a new play recently. On the other hand, even Beethoven stopped at 33. Perhaps a truly great artist knows when a theme has been exhausted?