Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Gayleen Aiken’s first ever show in Chicago, Gayleen Aiken: I Have Many Hobbies, organized by Peter Gallo and Sean Horton. Gayleen Aiken (1934 – 2005), a self-taught artist from Barre, Vermont, produced paintings and drawings that combined narrative text and image, cardboard cut-outs, and handmade books, often featuring a cast of recurring characters which she called the Raimbilli Cousins, members of an imaginary extended family that she invented as a child. The show will open in Gallery 2 at Western Exhibitions’ Chicago location with a free public reception on Friday, January 5, from 5 to 8 pm, and will run through February 24, 2023.
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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 this exhibition 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 former G.R.A.C.E. gallery in Hardwick, VT, which 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 strip-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

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Gayleen Aiken (1934-2005, Barre, VT) has been featured in exhibitions at the American Visionary Museum, Baltimore; the Fairbanks Museum, St. Johnsbury, VT; the Vermont Granite Museum, Barre, VT; the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History, Middlebury; the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Williamsburg, VA; the Gallery at Lincoln Center, New York; Horton Gallery, New York; Luise Ross Gallery, New York; and KS Art, New York; among others.

Her work is currently featured in If You Build It, They Will Come: Visionary Artists & Their Environments at the American Visionary Museum, Baltimore.

In 2005, Sean Horton curated Old Nickelodeon and a Game of Catch, which paired the artist with a younger, emerging artist, for Burlington City Arts. In 2007, Peter Gallo curated Our Yard In The Future, a survey of the artist’s work, for Sunday LES (Horton Gallery), New York following his inclusion of her work in the traveling group exhibition Insider Art in 1990.

The artist is in the permanent collection of the American Folk Art Museum, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Museum of American Folk Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. 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 Brooklyn Rail and The Boston Globe.

Curators:

Peter Gallo (born 1959 in Rutland, Vermont) is an artist, writer, and educator who lives and works in Hyde Park, VT. Gallo’s artwork is represented by Sean Horton in New York and Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London, UK. As an artist, Gallo draws from a wide variety of sources—art historical, political, and literary—and often incorporates poetic, philosophical, and found texts in his mixed-media paintings. He utilizes simple formal structures which emphasize the materiality of painting, and his works alternate between or combine both abstract and figurative elements. His paintings often incorporate unconventional materials, including buttons, toothpicks, newspaper clippings, found photographs, string, typed texts, dental floss, and chicken bones. His “improvisatory” style has been compared to that of Ree Morton, Joy Division, and Forrest Bess. Critic Jonathon Goodman (Brooklyn Rail) writes that in current art trends, this kind of “ad hoc creativity often serves to mask poor skills, but in Gallo’s case, the rawness is a genuine part of his aesthetic, whose ungainliness keeps us thinking.” Gallo’s works have been featured in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and Europe, and are included in notable collections of contemporary art.

Sean Horton (born 1975 in Dodd City, Texas) is an arts professional with over twenty years of experience working directly with artists, patrons, and press to produce exhibitions and garner public support. Horton presented the New York solo debuts of Elijah Burgher, Leidy Churchman, Corydon Cowansage, Lauren dela Roche, Keltie Ferris, Kate Groobey, Kirk Hayes, Madjeen Isaac, Natasza Niedziółka, and Nyugen E. Smith, among others. Widely reviewed gallery exhibitions have also included those by Peter Gallo, Clare Grill, Michael Jones McKean, and Aaron Spangler. Horton has exhibited outsider artists Gayleen Aiken, David Byrd, Royal Robertson, and Miroslav Tichý, as well as artwork by notable indie musicians and filmmakers Martha Colburn, Joel Gibb, and G.B. Jones. The gallery has hosted live musical performances by David Bazan, Kath Bloom, Geechee Dan, and L’Amour Bleu (with Stanley Love). He currently operates SEAN HORTON at 515 West 20th Street, 3rd Floor in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City.

Image info: Gayleen Aiken , “Untitled (New-Letter Book No. 1)”, 1985. Colored pencil & collage on paper. 4h x 6 1/4w in.

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