Hemingway Museum

In addition to Oak Park having a museum dedicated to Ernest Hemingway's birthplace, there is a tangential museum located just down the block from his birth home. The museum is in the lower level of the Oak Park Arts Center, which was originally built as the 1st Church of Christ, Scientist and now used a concert and performance venue. The museum covers Hemingway's personality, writings, and interactions with the village - he did attend the local high school, Oak Park and River Forest High School. And after he served in World War I he was given a hero's welcome home. Oak Park celebrates Hemingway's connection with the village by many annual events every year and is very proud to have such a cultural icon rooted here. Personally, I'm happy to have had learned more about Hemingway and I hope to reread many of his writings soon.

The Henry Darger Room

Entering the secretive world of outsider artist Henry Darger can be fascinating, but also unsettling for those unfamiliar with him. Darger was a reclusive school janitor, World War I veteran, and prolific writer and artist. He passed away in the 1970s and when they began to clear out his room they discovered a book he had written that was several thousand pages long about an epic tale about the Vivian Girls and their adventures. Darger had a wonderful visual sense of narrative and also used tracing as a recurring technique within his drawings. 

Darger had a distorted understanding of children, depicting them sometimes naked and in graphic scenarios that usually dealt with loss and the exploitation of innocence. He never openly expressed whether or not he wanted his work to be exhibited, casually mentioning before his death that everything he owned could just get burned or thrown away.

At the Intuit Center, they've permanently recreated his room that he lived in for many years and filled it many actually objects he owned. It's a fascinating place about a very fascinating person. Below I've included that full documentary about Darger, "The Realms of the Unreal".

 

The Henry Darger full documentary "The Realms of the Unreal" (Youtube):