FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition Our Yard in the Future: The Art of Gayleen Aiken. The exhibition features a rare selection of paintings, drawings, comics, cardboard cut-outs, broadsides, and other paraphernalia, most of which has never been publicly exhibited before, by one of America’s most gifted and prolific outsiders. Curated by artist, curator and critic Peter Gallo, who knew and corresponded with the artist, the show features some of Gayleen Aiken’s earliest works, and spotlights historic examples from the l950’s, 60’s, and 70’s gleaned from the significant collection of works discovered in her apartment after her death in 2005.

Artist, musician, and historian of her beloved hometown Barre, Vermont, Gayleen Aiken produced a haunting and beautiful 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.

Gayleen Aiken (1934-2005, Barre, VT) has been featured in exhibitions at the American Visionary Museum, the Fairbanks Museum, the Vermont Granite Museum, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Gallery at Lincoln Center and KS Art, New York. 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.. 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, and The Boston Globe.

Peter Gallo is an artist, curator, and critic who resides in Hyde Park, VT. His past curatorial projects include: Transformations of Text: Visual Art and the Written Word; Basquiat, Ruscha, Hammond, Cross-Currents of Influence: Local Art after Modernism, and the traveling exhibition Insider Art. He is a regular contributor to Art in America, to which he has recently offered reviews of General Idea and Julian Schnabel, among others. He will be having his second New York solo show with SUNDAY in the fall.

Our Yard in the Future: The Art of Gayleen Aiken is made possible in collaboration with the non-profit organization G.R.A.C.E. (Grass Roots Art and Community Effort), where Gayleen Aiken began exhibiting her work after being introduced to its late founder, Don Sunseri, in the late 80’s. Located in Hardwick, Vermont, G.R.A.C.E. has been a vital force in the community life of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom for twenty-five years, providing a voice for individuals at the grassroots level.

Our Yard in the Future

I first saw Gayleen Aiken’s paintings at an upstairs gallery and frame shop in Hanover, New Hampshire in the late summer of 1980. I was a college student at the time and had gone to the gallery to attend the opening of a show of etchings by one of my professors. A small exhibition of Gayleen’s work was arranged in a narrow out-of the way hall. It was scarcely attended and those few who did wander through from the evening’s main event were not so receptive. The show featured perhaps a dozen small pictures, some of them postcard size, mostly oil on canvas board or window blind fabric glued to cardboard, hanging from string. The paintings depicted her now famous Raimbilli Cousins cavorting under the moonlight set in skies more reminiscent of Ensor or Nolde than Grandma Moses.

The display was presided over by a short, sturdy, amiable fellow in Birkenstock’s, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, the artist Don Sunseri. Later I would learn that Gayleen, even after her star had risen, very rarely left her hometown of Barre, Vermont, and its surrounding environs. This was my first acquaintance with Don, and the beginning of our long friendship; Don started the Grass Roots Art and Community Efforts in the mid-1970’s after leaving Manhattan for Vermont’s rural Northeast Kingdom, and discovered Gayleen’s paintings at local art shows and county fairs. He eventually became her friend, promoter, and collaborator. This was one of the first solo shows he organized of her work.

Assembling the works for “Our Yard in the Future” – the title of one of the artist’s earliest paintings from the l950’s when she was in her late teens – has been, in many ways, a second chance for me to experience Gayleen’s work for the first time. It was also bittersweet as I revisited my memories of Gayleen, but also of my great friendship with Don who predeceased Gayleen in 2002. I sorted through hundreds of things many of which have never been publicly exhibited – and which perhaps Don had not even seen. Most of these works were discovered in the artist’s small living space after her death in 2005. These included, among other things, paintings, drawings, signs, cut-out figures, lists, broadsides, scrapbooks, handmade chapbooks and comics which are still being sorted through and documented at the G.R.A.C.E. gallery in Hardwick, VT. G.R.A.C.E. currently functions as a sort of makeshift archive for Gayleen’s enormous body of work.

Gayleen was a multi-media performance artist and the endless stream of artifacts she created were the elements of a sprawling but never finished gesamtkunstwerk. Those of us who had the good fortune to visit the artist at her home had to commit, prior to arrival, entire afternoons which she filled with elaborate and sometimes relentless programs of music, poetry, art, puppet shows, demonstrations of her latest gadgets, samplings of her fabulous record and music roll collections (among the many marvelous things in her tiny living space was an upright player piano…). I remember most fondly one winter afternoon Don and I arrived for a very short visit. Gayleen had arranged three colored lights – red, blue and green – on a dresser and spent the time making marvelous observations about the spectrum of light that bathed the wall behind them; it was stunning.

It is highly unlikely that a small selection (no matter how large that small selection might be!) of Aiken’s works could convey the range and beauty of her project; or the degree to which her life and her art were interwoven; there is simply so much material and so many ways to approach it. For example an entire exhibition could be devoted to the way her work documents the technological transformation of musical experience during the second part of the last century. Beginning in the late 1950’s Gayleen even made extensive notations in her scrapbooks on who bought televisions in her neighborhood! Another could map out the ways that modernity during her lifetime had transfigured the countryside between villages and cities from orchards to stip-malls and housing developments. What this selection does highlight is the degree Gayleen devoted herself to her subjects and themes and the brilliant maneuvers she pulled off to keep these subjects and themes so alive.

– Peter Gallo