Herrera's early work centered on small, handcrafted series of collages in which he cut, layered and intertwined fragments from coloring books, advertisements, cartoons and fairy tales with painterly marks and abstract shapes. These images were often bizarre hybrids: Donald Duck's lower torso morphing into a Häagen-Dazs ice cream bar in a coloring book landscape; an upside-down, scribbled-over Tweety seeing a teddy bear flattened by a Wonder Bread wrapper and a phallus-shaped cutout. The splicing and destruction of the original material subverted its childhood innocence, evoking darker, provocative realms of the unconscious alluding to violence and sexuality. New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote of Herrera's "Desire" collages (Drawing Center, 1994): "polymorphously perverse and sweet, they seem to come from the hand of a child still too naive to disguise the depths of his own aggression." Herrera involved viewers directly in the web project Almost Home (Dia Center, 1998), which used an interactive, diptych format to pair collages (some animated) from a series of 100 collages in playful, chance juxtapositions.Dia Arts Foundation. Arturo Herrera, Almost Home, Projects. Retrieved April 5, 2023.
