The fascination of artists with the work of Henry Darger is easy to understand. Not only do his images beg to be psychoanalyzed, but, like any so-called “outsider” artist, Darger seems to represent the creative impulse at its most potent and pure.

In “Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger,” which opens Tuesday at the American Folk Art Museum, the curator, Brooke Davis Anderson, has included in the wall text statements by 11 artists about where they first encountered Darger’s work and how it influenced them. Many say that seeing his work gave them the freedom to pursue their own, perhaps eccentric, lines of exploration.

The Turner Prize-winning ceramicist Grayson Perry recalls seeing Darger’s art in 1979, in an exhibition called “The Outsiders” at the Hayward Gallery in London. “After seeing all the outpourings of artists unconcerned by the values of art history or the market,” Mr. Perry says, “I felt like I had been given permission to make works principally motivated by my obsessions and my inner imaginative world.” Another artist, Trenton Doyle Hancock, says that what he learned from Darger “was completely the opposite of what we learned in grad school. Henry Darger’s art wasn’t about the Art World driving the Work. It was about the Work driving the Work.”

Darger lived most of his life in Chicago, supporting himself as a janitor and attending Catholic Mass as many as five times a day. Shortly before his death in 1973, his landlords, Nathan and Kyoko Lerner, found in his apartment a 15,000-page manuscript about the “Vivan girls,” seven blond sisters who battle against an evil regime of child slavery. Darger had illustrated it with hundreds of watercolors and drawings, many of which show the girls being brutally tortured. Some critics have speculated that Darger was exorcising his own violent fantasies; others have traced the images to his childhood experience of being imprisoned in the Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Ill., from which he escaped at 16. In 2000, the Folk Art Museum acquired a large trove of Darger’s paintings and manuscript books from Kyoko Lerner; it now has the largest collection of his artwork in the world.

Ms. Anderson said that, after the museum did its two major exhibitions on Darger, in 1997 and 2001, she started noticing more and more work in Chelsea galleries that showed his influence.

“I started keeping track,” Ms. Anderson said in an interview. “I would have friends call me and say, ‘You have to go check this out, because it feels exactly like Darger, or it looks exactly like Darger.'”

She originally thought the idea might make a good article, but she eventually decided she wanted to do a full exhibition. She started with a list of 80 artists whose work critics had compared to Darger’s. But as she interviewed these artists, new leads surfaced. The 11 artists she finally chose were not on her initial list. Ultimately, she said, she was less interested in artists whose work looked like Darger’s than in those who explicitly cited Darger among their influences.

The 11 artists work in varied media. One, Jefferson Friedman, is a composer, who wrote a piece called “Sacred Heart: Explosion,” based on a watercolor by Darger. Anthony Goicolea and Justine Kurland are photographers who, like Darger, create fantasy worlds — populated, in Mr. Goicolea’s case, by multiple images of himself, and in Ms. Kurland’s, by groups of women and girls. A sculptor, Michael St. John, has made sculptures based on the “Blengigomeneans,” the winged, dragon-like creatures in Darger’s drawings, who often come to the girls’ aid.

“Dargerism” represents the first time that the Folk Art Museum has exhibited academically trained artists in juxtaposition with self-taught artists, and Ms. Anderson said that one of her goals is to show that Darger was not as far outside the art world discourse as people assume. He was, for example, an early adopter of the postmodern technique of appropriation. An intern at the museum, Kevin Miller, has curated a segment of the exhibition that displays some of the material from popular culture that Darger drew from, including newspaper and magazine clippings, comics, coloring books, and religious ephemera.

The image of the reclusive “outsider” artist “becomes less and less vivid the more you learn about him,” Ms. Anderson said. “There’s one work that begs you to ask whether he studied a similar composition at the Art Institute of Chicago. There are tempting art historical references,” she continued, while adding that there’s “more research that needs to be done.”

Like most of her colleagues at the museum, Ms. Anderson dislikes the label of the “outsider” artist. “The terminology of the ‘outsider’ artist works most successfully in the marketplace,” she said. “There always has to be an exotic, a counterpart to the mainstream of the art world. If it’s not women, it’s people of color. If it’s not people of color, then it’s this artist who is reclusive and made this work without any training. If it’s not that, then it’s African art.” Asked if any of the 11 artists balked at having their work exhibited in a museum dedicated to so-called “folk art,” Ms. Anderson said, “I was kind of expecting I would get a little of that, to be perfectly honest,” but, instead, all the artists were enthusiastic. (All but one of them will attend the opening, and Mr. Perry will give a lecture at the museum on Wednesday — his first ever in New York City.) “There’s no irony in any anybody’s use of [Darger’s] work,” Ms. Anderson said. “It’s a relationship of great respect and homage.”