Helène Aylon

Helène Aylon (née Greenfield; February 4, 1931 – April 6, 2020), was an American multimedia, eco-feminist artist, and educator. Her work can be divided into three phases: process art (1970s), anti-nuclear art (1980s), and The G-d Project (1990s and early 2000s), a feminist commentary on the Hebrew Bible and other established traditions. In 2012, Aylon published, Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist. She attended grade school at Shulamith School for Girls and her high school education was at the Midrasha; Aylon, however, originally wanted to attend The High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. Aylon moved immediately to Montréal, where her husband served as a rabbi. After two years, she gave birth to a son, Nathaniel Fisch, followed by a daughter, Renee Emunah. The couple returned to Brooklyn while Aylon was pregnant with her second child. Mandel Fisch was diagnosed with cancer in 1956 and died five years later; Aylon was 30. She studied at the Art Students League of New York in 1961; and the Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1962.

Teaching and feminism She subsequently taught at San Francisco State University, and the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. In 1980, Aylon received a M.A. degree in women's studies from Antioch College/West. Aylon described this work as "very wet, orgasmic process art." This work consisted of an "ambulance" (a converted U-Haul van) that symbolized an attempt to save the world from nuclear war. Using the Earth Ambulance, Aylon gathered dirt from Strategic Air Command nuclear bases, uranium mines, and nuclear reactors from across the United States. She stuffed the dirt into pillowcases and used them in a demonstration at the United Nations during the Second Special Session on Nuclear Disarmament on June 12, 1982. In front of a group of spectators, the pillowcases were carried down the steps of Ralph Bunche Park on army stretchers. In 1992, to celebrate the end of the Cold War, she installed a seed-filled ambulance at the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage, an alternative space in New York City. Pillowcases from previous projects were hung around the installation.

In 1985, Aylon traveled to Japan to mark the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Floating sacks of seeds, grain, pods, and bamboo were sent down the rivers towards those two cities. In 1995, Aylon's video of the "two sacs en route" to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was shown on the Sony Jumbotron in Times Square.

The G-d Project After the death of Aylon's husband in 1961, she began to develop an idea of reformed Judaism which rejected the patriarchal notions in the Five Books of Moses. In the 1990s, Aylon began work on The G-d Project, a nine-part project that spanned two decades. The first work in the project, The Liberation of G-d, contains the five books of Moses, in English and Hebrew, which sit on velvet-covered stands. Each page is covered in translucent parchment. The sound of turning parchment pages was recorded and played in a loop while the work was on exhibition. Aylon placed the 54 sections of the Torah on glass shelves along a wall, adjacent to the five books of Moses, and used a pink highlighter to mark phrases that, according to her, convey patriarchal attitudes. The work was first exhibited in Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art in March 1996. During the exhibition, Aylon formally invited area rabbis to visit and discuss her work.

In 1997, she completed The Women's Section, the second work in The G-d Project, which is dedicated to women with the marital status of agunah: whose estranged husbands do not grant them a Jewish religious divorce called a Get, making it impossible for them to remarry. Included are texts from the Torah that speak of women's "impurity" and "virginity."

In 1998, Aylon created the third work in the series, My Notebooks, which consists of 54 blank 8.5 × 11″ notebooks that form a group of columns. The closed notebooks, with their dark covers, form black columns; the open notebooks form white columns. A transparency of Aylon's photographs from a Jewish girls' school is projected across the notebooks. The work is "Dedicated to Mrs. Rashi and to Mrs. Maimonides, for surely they have something to say" and was intended to be a statement on women's lack of scholarship and participation in education."

In 1999, Aylon created Epilogue: Alone With My Mother, the fourth work in the series. This work features a seven-foot-wide alcove with a pew, facing a stand with two open Bibles fixed in a way that stops them from closing. In the Bibles the blessings and curses of the last chapters of Deuteronomy are highlighted. In this work, Aylon projected shifting images onto a white bedsheet to represent menstrual impurity, while a cascade of voice recordings counted the waiting times between periods and ritual baths.

In 2002, Aylon completed The Partition Is in Place, But the Service Can't Begin, the seventh work in the series. In this work there is a wall made of tzitzit and large photocopies of the Western Wall. In 2005 she "added another layer of meaning to the Wrestlers by focusing on one particular wrestling fore-mother - Lot's Wife - and I gave her a name." That name was Hashemshela, which according to Aylon means "her name" in Hebrew. In the work a wooded platform with three steps holds three chairs with tzitzit dangling from them, flanked by two pink pillowcase-flags and three signs with pink dashes that read "In G-d We Trust." A petitioner's bench faces the bet din. A year before her death, Aylon showed her early work at Leslie Tonkonow, her first major New York solo show since 1979.

Public collections and recognition Aylon's work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Jewish Museum. She was the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts.

Awards 2016: Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award