Gayleen Aiken (March 25, 1934 – March 29, 2005) was an American artist who lived in

Barre, Vermont Barre, Vermont may refer to: *Barre (city), Vermont *Barre (town), Vermont Barre ( ) is a New England town, town in Washington County, Vermont, Washington County, Vermont, United States. The population was 7,923 at the 2020 census, making it the 3r ...

. She achieved critical acclaim during her lifetime for her naive paintings and her work has been included in exhibitions of visionary and folk art since the 1980s. She is considered an

outsider art Outsider art is art made by self-taught or supposedly naïve artists with typically little or no contact with the conventions of the art worlds. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates e ...

ist.

Life

Aiken was born in

, on March 25, 1934. She was self-taught as an artist. In the early 1980s she was discovered by

Grass Roots Art and Community Effort Grass Roots Art & Community Effort (GRACE) is a non-profit organization based in Hardwick, Vermont Vermont () is a state in the northeast New England region of the United States. Vermont is bordered by the states of Massachusetts to the so ...

(GRACE), a Vermont grass-roots arts organization. GRACE's exhibition program exhibited her work for the first time.

Work

Gayleen Aiken produced paintings and drawings that often combined narrative text and image, cardboard cut-outs, and book works. She used crayon, pen, pencil, and oil paint.Kogan, Lee. "Aiken, Gayleen Beverly (1934 )." ''The Encyclopedia of American Folk Art'', edited by Gerard C. Wertkin, and Lee Kogan, Routledge, 1st edition, 2003. Her themes included

music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect ...

and

musical instruments A musical instrument is a device created or adapted to make musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can be considered a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. A person who pl ...

, the large old

farmhouse FarmHouse (FH) is a social Fraternities and sororities in North America, fraternity founded at the University of Missouri on April 15, 1905. It became a national organization in 1921. Today FarmHouse has 33 active chapters and four associate ch ...

where she grew up, the lyricism of Vermont's seasons, the

granite Granite () is a coarse-grained (phaneritic) intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly cools and solidifies undergro ...

industry, and rural life. These themes were connected via a cast of recurring characters, members of an imaginary extended family which she called the Raimbilli Cousins.

Awards

In 1987, Aiken was a recipient of a Vermont Council on the Arts fellowship. In 1997, Harry B. Abrams, Inc. released ''Moonlight and Music: The Enchanted World of Gayleen Aiken'', produced with the novelist Rachel Klein. Her artwork has been featured in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', ''

Raw Vision ''Raw Vision''rawvision.com is a British magazine devoted to outsider art and edited by John Maizels. It features content about the subject worldwide. History ''Raw Vision'' was founded by John Maizels in 1989 as a way of telling people about ou ...

'', ''

The Boston Globe ''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...

'', '' Smithsonian'', and ''

Folk Art Folk art covers all forms of visual art made in the context of folk culture. Definitions vary, but generally the objects have practical utility of some kind, rather than being exclusively decorative art, decorative. The makers of folk art a ...

'' Magazine.

Collections and exhibits

Aikens's works are included in the permanent collections of the

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (commonly known as SAAM, and formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds o ...

, Washington, D.C.;

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum (AARFAM) is the United States' first and the world's oldest continually operated museum dedicated to the preservation, collection, and exhibition of American folk art. Located just outside the histori ...

, Williamsburg, VA;

Museum of American Folk Art The American Folk Art Museum is an art museum in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, at 2, Lincoln Square, Columbus Avenue at 66th Street. It is the premier institution devoted to the aesthetic appreciation of folk art and creative expressions of ...

, New York, NY and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia, PA. Aikens's art has also been featured in many exhibitions, including at Lincoln Center Gallery, the

American Visionary Art Museum The American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) is an art museum located in Baltimore, Maryland's Federal Hill neighborhood at 800 Key Highway Maryland Route 2 (MD 2) is the longest state highway in the U.S. state of Maryland. The route runs fro ...

, and ''Works by Gayleen Aiken'' (2002) at the Vermont Granite Museum. She had a one-woman show of about 30 paintings in the Gallery at Lincoln Center in New York City in 1987. Posthumous solo exhibits of her work include ''Our Yard in the Future: The Art of Gayleen Aiken'', an exhibit curated by artist

Peter Gallo Peter Gallo (born 1959 in Rutland (city), Vermont, Rutland, Vermont) is an artist and writer who lives and works in Hyde Park (town), Vermont, Hyde Park, Vermont, VT. He received his Ph.D. and MA in Art History from Concordia University, Montrea ...

, at the SUNDAY L.E.S. (now Horton Gallery) in New York City in 2007, and ''Cousins, Quarries and a Nickelodeon'' at the Luise Ross Gallery, New York in 2013. She was featured in the 2013

Outsider Art Fair The Outsider Art Fair or OAF is an international exhibition that features outsider artists who work in a variety of mediums. It is a biannual fair occurring in New York City and Paris, the former taking place in January and the latter in October. P ...

In popular culture

Jay Craven Jay Craven is a Vermont film director, screenwriter and former professor of film studies at Marlboro College. Craven is known for creating award-winning films on modest budgets, adopting many of the novels of author Howard Frank Mosher to film ...

's 1985 documentary, ''Gayleen,'' details Aiken's life and artworks.

References

External links

GRACE Gallery of art works by Gayleen Aiken

Review: Gayleen Aiken @ SUNDAY in the Brooklyn Rail
*http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/arts/design/outsider-art-fair-opens-at-548-west-22nd-street.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=1&
Article: Raw Vision Magazine
{{DEFAULTSORT:Aiken, Gayleen 1934 births 2005 deaths 20th-century American painters American outsider artists Naïve painters 20th-century American women painters Women outsider artists People from Barre, Vermont Painters from Vermont 21st-century American painters 21st-century American women painters