Name Gayleen Aiken | Role Artist | |
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Died March 2005, Barre City, Vermont, United States Similar Mequitta Ahuja, Laura Myntti, Laylah Ali | ||
Gayleen Aiken (March 25, 1934 – 2005) was a self-taught American artist who lived her life in Barre, Vermont. Gayleen Aiken achieved critical acclaim during her lifetime for her naive paintings. Her work has been included in many exhibitions of visionary and folk art from the 1980s onwards. She is considered an Outsider artist.
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Life
Aiken was born in Barre, Vermont, on March 25, 1934.
In the early 80s Gayleen Aiken was discovered by Grass Roots Art & Community Effort (GRACE), a Vermont grass-roots arts organization. The "Grass Roots Art and Community Effort's" exhibition program exhibited her work for the first time in.... GRACE, [1], a not-for-profit organization founded by artist Don Sunseri in 1975, works to discover, develop and promote the population of elders and other special constituencies in rural Vermont.
Work
Gayleen Aiken produced paintings and drawings, that often combined narrative text and image, cardboard cut-outs, and book works; her themes include music and musical instruments, the large old farmhouse where she grew up, the lyricism of Vermont’s seasons, the granite industry, and the pleasures and ordeals of rural life. These themes are threaded together by a cast of characters, members of an imaginary extended family, which she called The Raimbilli Cousins.
In popular culture
Jay Craven's 1985 documentary Gayleen details Gayleen's life and artworks.
Awards
and 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, Raw Vision, The Boston Globe, Smithsonian, and Folk Art Magazine.
Collections and exhibits
Gayleen Aikens's works are included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Williamsburg, VA, Museum of American Folk Art, 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, Works by Gayleen Aiken(2002) at the Vermont Granite Museum.
Posthumous solo exhibits of her work include Our Yard in the Future: The Art of Gayleen Aiken, an exhibit curated by artist Peter Gallo, at the SUNDAY L.E.S. (now Horton Gallery) in New York, NY, in 2007 and Cousins, Quarries and a Nickelodeon at the Luise Ross Gallery, NY in 2013.
She was featured in the 2013 Outsider Art Fair.