Gayleen Aiken

Who was Gayleen Aiken?

Gayleen Aiken was an artist, musician, and historian who lived most of her life in Barre, Vermont. Gayleen Aiken shared her unique artistic vision with the world through Vermont's Grass Roots Art and Community Effort's exhibition program. GRACE, 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.

Gayleen Aiken produced a body of work that often combined texts and images; 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.

The work of Gayleen Aiken has been featured in exhibitions at New York's Lincoln Center Gallery, the American Visionary Museum, the Vermont Granite Museum, and the Luise Ross Gallery, NY. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Museum of American Folk Art, Williamsburg, VA the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Museum of American Folk Art, New York, NY and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia, PA. In 2007, the artist and friend Peter Gallo organized the first posthumous exhibition of her work at SUNDAY in New York.