Inside an Outsider’s Mind | The New York Observer

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Artist Henry Darger led an Ellison-esque existence, an invisible man until his death in 1973. Posthumously elected mascot for the Outsider Art movement, Darger lived in a one-room apartment in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. For much of his life, he worked as a custodian in a Catholic hospital without even enough disposable income to keep a pet.

"Henry Darger had an art collection." That is the first sentence of curator Brooke Davis Anderson's introduction to the evocative exhibit devoted to the artist. She follows up in the second paragraph with the similar, but more challenging, "Henry Darger had an art collection?" The collector in questi