Gayleen Aiken (1934–2005, Barre, VT) [1] 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, [2], a not-for-profit organization, works to discover, develop and promote the population of elders and other special constituencies in rural Vermont.
Sometimes referred to as the "Grandma Moses" of Vermont [3] , 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 the American Visionary Museum, the Fairbanks Museum, the Vermont Granite Museum, and KS Art. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Museum of American Folk Art, Williamsburg, VA and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. [4]. In 2007, the artist and friend Peter Gallo organized the first posthumous exhibition of her work at SUNDAY in New York [5].
She is the subject of Jay Craven’s award winning film, Gayleen, 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. Her artwork has been featured in The New York Times, Raw Vision, The Boston Globe, Smithsonian, and Folk Art Magazine.