Cutting and Pasting a World

Intuit Art Museum is proud to participate in Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, a nationwide initiative led by Craft in America to honor the handmade during America’s Semiquincentennial. Through Cutting and Pasting a World: The Paper Craft of Henry Darger, an exhibition exploring the connection between Henry Darger’s art and traditional American paper crafts, we join museums, artists and organizations nationwide in celebrating the craft traditions that connect us through history and time. Drawing on research by guest curator and art historian Dr. Mary Trent (College of Charleston), the exhibition illustrates how the turn-of-the-century practices of making paper dolls and paper dollhouse scrapbooks may have influenced Darger’s evolution as an artist and maker. By showcasing both finished artworks and original source materials, the exhibition demonstrates how Darger adapted these humble pastimes into sophisticated methods for constructing large-scale, mixed-media narratives. The exhibition provides context for these crafts within the early 20th-century movement to instill middle-class American ​“taste” in a burgeoning immigrant population. Likely exposed to these practices within social welfare institutions as a child, Darger ultimately subverted them—transforming decorative domestic crafts into a profound and complex commentary on the vulnerabilities of marginalized children.