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65-521: Henry Joseph Darger Jr. ( / ˈ d ɑːr ɡ ər / DAR -ghər ; April 12, 1892 – April 13, 1973) was an American writer, novelist and artist who worked as a hospital custodian in Chicago , Illinois . He has become famous for his posthumously recovered 15,145-page manuscript for a fantasy novel titled The Story of the Vivian Girls , along with several hundred drawings and watercolor illustrations for

130-480: A building." However, a cleaner does not always have to be employed and perform work for pay, such as in the case of volunteer work or community service . "Cleaner" may also refer to cleaning agents e.g. oven cleaner, or devices used for cleaning, e.g. vacuum cleaner. Cleaning operatives may specialize in cleaning particular things or places, such as window cleaners , housekeepers , janitors , crime scene cleaners and so on. Cleaning operatives often work when

195-581: A citywide 1934 census to help collect data related to the Great Depression , in what was known as the Local Community Fact Book . With the exception of 1970 (whose data was published in 1980 ), it continued this publication for every subsequent census through 1990, expanding in the 1960s to also cover major suburbs of Chicago. The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning continues this work by periodically publishing "Community Snapshots" of

260-548: A common identity. Except for the addition of two areas ( O'Hare from land annexed by the city in 1956 and Edgewater 's separation from Uptown in 1980) and peripheral expansions due to minor annexations, the areas' boundaries have never been revised to reflect change but instead have been kept stable. The areas have become a part of the culture of Chicago, contributing to its perception as a "city of neighborhoods" and breaking it down into smaller regions for easier analysis and local planning. Nevertheless, Park's and Burgess's ideas on

325-585: A huge amount of coverage in the Daily News and other papers at the time. This newspaper photo was part of a growing personal archive of clippings Darger had been gathering. There is no indication that the murder or the news photo and article had any particular significance for Darger, until one day he could not find it. Writing in his journal at the time, he began to process this forfeiture of yet another child, lamenting that "the huge disaster and calamity" of his loss "will never be atoned for", but "shall be avenged to

390-402: A photographer who had lost the rights to photographs by Vivian Maier after her distant heirs were uncovered, read a law article questioning Kiyoko Lerner's legal right to Darger's artwork. He located Darger's legal heirs by himself and notified them of their legal claim. In June 2022, a probate judge agreed to make one of the distant relatives, Christen Sadowski, "the supervised administrators of

455-498: A reflection of Darger's own childhood issues with sexual identity and homosexuality . Darger's second novel, Crazy House , deals with these subjects more explicitly. However this may simply reflect Darger's lack of knowledge of anatomy as girls are always depicted either with no genitalia at all, or with penises. In a paraphrase of the Declaration of Independence , Darger wrote of children's right "to play, to be happy, and to dream,

520-458: A single community area. The Chicago Department of Public Health wished to present local differences in birth and death rates; it worked with the committee to produce the list of 75 community areas, which were divided into 935 census tracts. After the community areas were introduced, the University of Chicago Press published data sorted by them from the 1920 and 1930 Censuses , as well as

585-510: A window cleaner to be able or willing to clean a carpet. For example, according to International Standard Classification of Occupations and European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations , the profession of a cleaner can be divided into: In addition: The cleaning person may receive waste and carry out activities related to its transport to the place of storage, segregation and recycling . Cleaning can be done freely, free of charge and without employment e.g. social cleaning of

650-677: Is inscribed "Artist" and "Protector of Children". In the Realms of the Unreal is a 15,145-page work bound in fifteen immense, densely typed volumes (with three of them consisting of several hundred illustrations, scroll-like watercolor paintings on paper derived from magazines and coloring books) created over six decades. Darger illustrated his stories using a technique of traced images cut from magazines and catalogues, arranged in large panoramic landscapes and painted in watercolors, some as large as 30 feet wide and painted on both sides. He wrote himself into

715-727: Is the Artists Rights Society . Darger is today one of the most famous figures in the history of outsider art . At the Outsider Art Fair , held every January in New York City , and at auction , his work is among the highest-priced of any self-taught artist. The American Folk Art Museum in New York opened a Henry Darger Study Center in 2001. His work now commands upwards of $ 750,000. Darger left no will and no immediate surviving relatives when he died in 1973. In 2021, Ron Slattery,

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780-952: Is traditionally divided into the three "sides" of the North Side, West Side , and South Side by the Chicago River. These three sides are represented by the white stripes on the Flag of Chicago . The city is also divided into 50 wards for the purpose of electing one alderman each to the Chicago City Council . These wards have at times generated identities similar to neighborhoods. Unlike community areas, wards are adjusted decennially to account for population shifts. Another method of neighborhood nomenclature in heavily Catholic neighborhoods of Chicago has been to refer to communities in terms of parishes . For example, one might say, "I live in St. Gertrude's, but he

845-546: The Chicago City Council which undergo redistricting based in population movements, and the parishes of the Roman Catholic Church. The Social Science Research Committee at the University of Chicago defined the community areas in the 1920s based on neighborhoods or groups of related neighborhoods within the city. In this effort it was led by sociologists Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess , who believed that physical contingencies created areas that would inevitably form

910-533: The Chicago River to form distinctive and consistent areas within the city, which he deemed "natural" areas that would eventually merge into a distinctive identity. Ernest Burgess , a colleague of Park's who shared his thinking, was crucial in creating and naming the community areas. Initially able to identify 400 neighborhoods of the city, he considered that number excessive and trimmed it down to 80 and thereafter 75 by grouping related neighborhoods into

975-515: The Coppertone Girl and Little Annie Rooney . He is praised for his natural gift for composition and the brilliant use of color in his watercolors. The images of daring escapes, mighty battles, and painful torture are reminiscent not only of contemporaneous epic films such as The Birth of a Nation (which Darger might easily have seen) but of events in Catholic history; the text makes it clear that

1040-576: The Lake Michigan shoreline. The areas are used for statistical and planning purposes by such professions as assessors, charities, and reporters. Shortly after their development they were used for all kinds of statistics, including movie theater distribution and juvenile delinquency. Although developed by the University of Chicago, they have been used by other universities in the Chicago area, as well as by

1105-596: The Lincoln Park section of the city, near the DePaul University campus. It was in this room for the next 43 years that Darger would imagine and write his massive tomes (in addition to a 10-year daily weather journal and assorted diaries) and collect and display artwork until his death at St. Augustine's Home for the Aged (the same institution at which his father had died) on April 13, 1973, one day after his 81st birthday. In

1170-1207: The Museum of Modern Art and the American Folk Art Museum in New York, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, the Art Institute of Chicago , the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art , the New Orleans Museum of Art , the Milwaukee Art Museum , the Collection de l'art brut , the Walker Art Center , the Irish Museum of Modern Art , the Smithsonian American Art Museum , High Museum of Art , Musée National d'Art Moderne , Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris , Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art in Villeneuve d'Ascq , and

1235-456: The Museum of Old and New Art , in Tasmania; Australia. Darger's art also has been featured in many notable museum exhibitions, including "The Unreality of Being" exhibit curated by Stephen Prokopoff. It was also seen in "Disasters of War" (P.S. 1, New York, 2000), where it was presented alongside prints from the famous Francisco Goya series The Disasters of War and works derived from these by

1300-629: The Aged . Because of his apparent intellect, the young Darger had been enrolled in public school at the third grade level; after his father's hospitalization, Darger was moved to the Mission of Our Lady of Mercy , a Roman Catholic orphanage. After bad behavior, he was relocated to the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Illinois , also called the Lincoln State School (later changed to

1365-833: The British contemporary-art duo Jake and Dinos Chapman . Darger's work has also been shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art , the Philadelphia Museum of Art , the Setagaya Art Museum , and the Collection de l'art brut , La Maison Rouge , Museum Kunstpalast , Musée d'Art Moderne de Lille-Métropole , and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts . In 2008, the exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum , titled "Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger", examined

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1430-747: The Glandelinians. Children take up arms in their own defense and are often slain in battle or viciously tortured by the Glandelinian overlords. The elaborate mythology includes the setting of a large planet, around which Earth orbits as a moon (where most people are Christian and mostly Catholic), and a species called the "Blengigomeneans" (or Blengins for short), gigantic winged beings with curved horns who occasionally take human or part-human form, even disguising themselves as children. They are usually benevolent, but some Blengins are extremely suspicious of all humans, due to Glandelinian atrocities. Once released from

1495-528: The Henry Darger Room Collection in 2008 as part of its permanent collection. Darger has become internationally recognized thanks to the efforts of the people who salvaged his work. After Nathan Lerner's death in 1997, Kiyoko Lerner became the sole figure in charge of both her husband's and Darger's estates. The U.S. copyright representative for the Estate of Henry Darger and the Estate of Nathan Lerner

1560-534: The Henry Darger Room Collection, an installation that meticulously recreates the small northside Chicago apartment where Darger lived and made his art. Janitor According to the Cambridge English dictionary a "cleaner" is "a person whose job is to clean houses , offices, public places, etc.:"; the Collins dictionary states that: "A cleaner is someone who is employed to clean the rooms and furniture inside

1625-816: The Lincoln Developmental Center before its closure in 2002), with the diagnosis, according to Stephen Prokopoff , that "little Henry's heart is not in the right place". According to John MacGregor, the diagnosis was actually "self-abuse", a euphemism for masturbation. Darger himself felt that much of his problem was being able to see through adult lies and becoming a "smart-aleck" as a result, which often led to his being punished by teachers and ganged up on by classmates. He also felt compelled to make unusual noises. The Lincoln asylum's practices included forced child labor and severe punishments, which Darger would later seemingly incorporate into his writing. Darger later said that, to be fair, there were also "good times" at

1690-514: The Lincoln asylum, Darger repeatedly attempted to adopt a child, but his efforts failed. Images of children often served as his inspiration, particularly a portrait from the Chicago Daily News from May 9, 1911: a five-year-old murder victim, named Elsie Paroubek . The girl had left home on April 8 of that year telling her mother she was going to visit her aunt around the corner from her home. She

1755-596: The Netherlands, the number of cleaning companies grew from 5,000 in 2003 to 8,000 in 2008. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2023 the median pay of a janitor working in the US was $ 16.84 per hour. Cleaning is one of the most commonly outsourced services. Some of the reasons for this include: The cleaning industry is quite big as different types of cleaning are required for different objects and different properties. For example, cleaning an office space requires

1820-589: The Pilsen and Back of the Yards neighborhoods are much better known than their respective community areas Lower West Side and New City . In the case of New City this was a deliberate choice; Burgess opted for the less common "New City" to name the area as "Back of the Yards" carried a stigma after the publication of Upton Sinclair 's The Jungle (1904), which made the area notorious for its poor living conditions. Some of these discrepancies are due to names that were common at

1885-400: The Vivian Girls and Christianity are triumphant and another in which they are defeated and the godless Glandelinians reign. Darger's human figures were rendered largely by tracing, collage , or photo enlargement from popular magazines and children's books (much of the "trash" he collected was old magazines and newspapers, which he clipped for source material). Some of his favorite figures were

1950-412: The action unfolding during the same years as that of the earlier book. Begun in 1939, it is a tale of a house that is possessed by demons and haunted by ghosts, or has an evil consciousness of its own. Children disappear into the house and are later found brutally murdered. The Vivians and Penrod are sent to investigate and discover that the murders are the work of evil ghosts. The girls go about exorcising

2015-412: The activity performed and the situation for example: allergens , dust , biohazards , fall, possibility of contact with electric shock, slipping on a slippery surface, so safety equipment should be adapted to the situation. In addition: On the whole it is not recommended to perform this work for a person with severe allergies. The 2000 film Bread and Roses by British director Ken Loach depicted

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2080-451: The areas, which serve as the basis for a variety of urban planning initiatives on both the local and regional levels. The areas' boundaries do not generally change, allowing comparisons of statistics across time. The areas are distinct from but related to the more numerous neighborhoods of Chicago; an area often corresponds to a neighborhood or encompasses several neighborhoods, but the areas do not always correspond to popular conceptions of

2145-400: The art historian and psychologist John M. MacGregor, discovered that Rosa had two children before Henry, but did not discover their whereabouts. By Darger's own account, his father was kind and reassuring to him. Darger Sr. was a tailor with disabilities, and his poor health made caring for his son difficult. They lived together until 1900, when his father was taken to St. Augustine's Home for

2210-460: The asylum, he enjoyed some of the work, and he had friends as well as enemies. In 1908, Darger received word that his father had died in St. Augustine's Home for the Aged; Darger never had a chance to visit him since his departure eight years prior. He attempted to escape in 1908 by freight train , but was thwarted by police after reaching Chicago and forced back into the asylum. He escaped once more in 1909 and succeeded, now free in Chicago. With

2275-442: The book only spends 206 pages detailing Darger's early life before veering off into 4,672 pages of fiction about a powerful tornado called "Sweetie Pie", probably inspired by memories of a tornado he had witnessed in 1908. Darger's landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, discovered his work shortly before his death. Nathan Lerner , an accomplished photographer whose long career, The New York Times wrote, "was inextricably bound up in

2340-502: The child victims are heroic martyrs like the early saints. Art critic Michael Moon explains Darger's images of tortured children in terms of popular Catholic culture and iconography. These included martyr pageants and Catholic comic books with detailed, often gory tales of innocent female victims. One idiosyncratic feature of Darger's artwork is that his girl subjects are shown to have penises when unclothed or partially clothed. Darger biographer Jim Elledge speculates that this represents

2405-476: The city and regional planners. They have contributed to Chicago's reputation as the "city of neighborhoods", and are argued to break up an intimidating city into more manageable pieces. Chicago was an early adopter of such a system, and as of 1997 most cities in the United States still lacked analogous divisions. The areas do not necessarily correspond to popular imagination of the neighborhoods. For example,

2470-580: The community areas and suburbs, the most recent being data from 2018 published in June 2020 . Only two major changes have occurred in the boundaries of the community areas. O'Hare was created from land that was annexed by Chicago in 1956 to control O'Hare International Airport . Edgewater was separated from Uptown in 1980 as residents considered being joined to it a detriment to obtaining aid for local improvements. In addition to these two there have been minor changes due to further annexations and additions to

2535-418: The estate," making him "authorized to take possession of and collect the assets of the Estate, including its copyright and personal property interests." The estate immediately sued Kiyoko Lerner for control of the artworks. In March 2023, Lerner's motion to dismiss was denied on multiple grounds, and as of April 2023 the lawsuit is currently proceeding. Darger's works are included in the permanent collections of

2600-473: The first child slave rebellion. "The assassination of the child labor rebel Annie Aronburg... was the most shocking child murder ever caused by the Glandelinian Government" and was the cause of the war. Through their sufferings, valiant deeds and exemplary holiness, the Vivian Girls are hoped to be able to help bring about a triumph of Christianity. Darger provided two endings to the story, one in which

2665-399: The forest from garbage. Cleaning is sometimes done by convicts for rehabilitation or leniency purposes. Cleaning as a substitute punishment. However, in the other hand in some cases, cleaners are checked against criminal records . Office cleaning staff perform many of the same duties as janitors. However the tasks are divided among different members. Additional tasks include: Most of

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2730-418: The help of his godmother, Darger found menial employment in a Catholic hospital and in this fashion continued to support himself until his retirement in 1963. Except for a brief stint in the U.S. Army during World War I , his life took on a pattern that seems to have varied little. A devout Catholic , he attended Mass daily, frequently returning for as many as five services. He collected found objects from

2795-626: The history of visual culture in Chicago," immediately recognized the artistic merit of Darger's work. By this time Darger was in St. Augustine's, operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor , where his father had died. The Lerners took charge of the Darger estate, publicizing his work and contributing to projects such as the 2004 documentary In the Realms of the Unreal . In cooperation with Kiyoko Lerner, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art dedicated

2860-458: The inevitability of physically related areas forming a common bond have been questioned, and the unchanging nature of the areas has at times been seen as analytically problematic with major subsequent changes in the some of the areas' urban landscapes, such as the construction of expressways. During the 19th century wards were used by the Census Bureau for data at the level below cities. This

2925-484: The influence of Darger's œuvre on 11 artists, including Trenton Doyle Hancock , Robyn O'Neil and Amy Cutler , who were responding not only to the aesthetic nature of Darger's mythic work – with its tales of good versus evil, its epic scope and complexity, and its transgressive undertone – but also to his driven work ethic and all-consuming devotion to artmaking. Also in 2008, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art , in Chicago, opened its permanent exhibit of

2990-582: The last entry in his diary, Darger wrote: "January 1, 1971. I had a very poor nothing like Christmas. Never had a good Christmas all my life, nor a good new year, and now... I am very bitter but fortunately not revengeful, though I feel should be how I am..." Darger is buried at All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines, Illinois , in a plot called "The Old People of the Little Sisters of the Poor Plot". His headstone

3055-450: The mid-1930s, but he and Darger stayed in touch through letters until Schloeder's death in 1959. Darger's biographer Jim Elledge states it is heavily implied by Darger in his own writing that he and Schloeder had a romantic relationship while Schloeder lived in Chicago; Darger referred to Schloeder as his "special friend" on many occasions. In 1930, Darger settled into a second-floor room on Chicago's North Side at 851 West Webster Avenue in

3120-447: The most celebrated examples of outsider art . Darger was born on April 12, 1892, in Chicago , Illinois , to Henry Darger Sr., a German immigrant from Meldorf , and Rosa Fullman. Cook County records show he was born at home, located at 350 W. 24th Street. When he was four years old, his mother died of puerperal fever after giving birth to a daughter, who was given up for adoption; Darger never knew his sister. One of his biographers,

3185-667: The narrative as the children's protector. The largest part of the book, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion , follows the adventures of the daughters of Robert Vivian, seven princesses of the Christian nation of Abbieannia who assist a daring rebellion against the child slavery imposed by John Manley and

3250-414: The neighborhoods due to a number of factors including historical evolution and choices made by the creators of the areas. As of 2020 , Near North Side is the most populous of the areas with over 105,000 residents, while Burnside is the least populous with just over 2,500. Other geographical divisions of Chicago exist, such as the "sides" with origin in the 3 branches of the Chicago River , the 50 wards of

3315-548: The people who otherwise occupy the space are not around. They may clean offices at night or houses during the workday. The word janitor derives from the Latin "ianitor" , meaning doorkeeper or porter, itself from " ianua" , meaning door, entrance or gate. This derives from " Janus ", the Roman god of doors , gates and portals . Its first recorded use meaning "caretaker of a building, man employed to see that rooms are kept clean"

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3380-470: The place, but have to resort to arranging for a full-scale Holy Mass to be held in each room before the house is clean. They do this repeatedly, but it never works. The narrative ends mid-scene, with Darger having just been rescued from the Crazy House. In 1968, Darger became interested in tracing some of his frustrations back to his childhood and began writing The History of My Life . Spanning eight volumes,

3445-475: The right to normal sleep of the night's season, the right to an education, that we may have an equality of opportunity for developing all that are in us of mind and heart." A second work of fiction, provisionally titled Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago , contains over 10,000 handwritten pages. Written after The Realms , it takes that epic's major characters—the seven Vivian sisters and their companion/secret brother, Penrod—and places them in Chicago, with

3510-435: The services of a commercial cleaner, whereas cleaning a house requires a residential cleaner or residential cleaning service. Depending on the task, even these categories can be subdivided into, for example, end-of-lease cleaning, carpet cleaning , upholstery cleaning, window cleaning, car cleaning services etc. Cleaners specialize in a specific cleaning sector or even a specific task in a cleaning sector, and one cannot expect

3575-399: The situation and the type of cleaning. in addition: ladder , rake , bags for leaves. Not always, but depending on the situation, (for example during cleaning dusty or dangerous substances or places, window cleaning at high heights, being on a busy street or in factories) items used by cleaning staff can include safety equipment such as: The exposure of a cleaner to hazards depends on

3640-460: The story and two further works of literature. The visual subject matter of his work ranges from idyllic scenes in Edwardian interiors and tranquil flowered landscapes populated by children and fantastic creatures, to scenes of horrific terror and carnage depicting young children being tortured and massacred. Much of his artwork is mixed media with collage elements. Darger's artwork has become one of

3705-517: The streets – including shoes, eyeglasses, and balls of string – to exhibit alongside artwork in his home-studio. His dress was shabby, although he attempted to keep his clothes clean and mended, and he was largely solitary. His close friend of 48 years, William Schloeder, was of like mind on the subject of protecting abused and neglected children, and the pair proposed founding a "Children's Protective Society" that would put such children up for adoption to loving families. Schloeder left Chicago sometime in

3770-587: The struggle of cleaners in Los Angeles, California , for better pay and working conditions and for the right to join a union . In an interview with the BBC in 2001, Loach stated that thousands of cleaners from around 30 countries have since contacted him with tales similar to the one told in the film. Chicago%27s North Side The city of Chicago is divided into 77 community areas for statistical and planning purposes. Census data and other statistics are tied to

3835-419: The time of the adoption of community areas but have since been supplanted by others. The static nature of area boundaries is one of their benefits, but is also problematic at times such as when expressways were built in the mid-20th century and divided neighborhoods without area boundaries adapting. The concept of a "natural area" that underpinned Park's and Burgess's thinking has also been challenged. Chicago

3900-443: The uttermost limit". According to his autobiography, Darger believed the photo was among several items that were stolen when his locker at work was broken into. He never found his copy of the photograph again. Because he could not remember the exact date of its publication, he could not locate it in the newspaper archive. He carried out an elaborate series of novenas and other prayers for the picture to be returned. The fictive war that

3965-416: The work performed by janitors and building cleaners is indoors. Office and school buildings are usually cleaned when they are vacant, so most of the office janitorial staff work during the evening. The work can be physically taxing and sometimes dirty and unpleasant. General janitor duties often include the following tasks: The following are some items used by cleaning staff: However, the equipment depends on

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4030-445: Was in 1708. Between 17% and 23% of the total illegal immigrant population living in the United States work in the cleaning industry (and growing at a rate of 1/2% to 1/3% percent per year). In addition to this population offering an abundant source of inexpensive labor, janitorial work is mostly undertaken at night, making it an appealing option for janitorial companies to employ illegal workers seeking clandestine employment. In

4095-400: Was last seen listening to an organ grinder with her cousins. Her body was found a month later in a sanitary district channel near the screen guards of the powerhouse at Lockport . An autopsy found she had probably been suffocated—not strangled, as is often stated in articles about Darger. Paroubek's disappearance and murder, her funeral, and the subsequent investigation, were the subjects of

4160-591: Was problematic as wards were political subdivisions and thus changed after each census, limiting their utility for comparisons over time. Census tracts were first used in Chicago in the 1910 Census . However, by the 1920s the Social Science Research Committee at the University of Chicago wanted divisions that were more natural and manageable than the arbitrarily-designated and numerous census tracts. The sociologist Robert E. Park led this charge, considering physical barriers such as railroads and

4225-400: Was sparked by Darger's loss of the newspaper photograph of Paroubek, whose killer was never found, became Darger's magnum opus . He had been working on some version of the novel before this time (he makes reference to an early draft which was also lost or stolen), but now it became an all-consuming creation. In The Realms of the Unreal , Paroubek is imagined as Annie Aronburg, the leader of

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