Pioneering Feminist Helène Aylon Gets Her Due at Princeton University Art Museum

Helène Aylon, Terrestri: “Rescued” Earth (Earth ‘Paintings’) in front of the Isaiah Wall, Ralph Bunche Park, New York, June 12, 1982. Black and white print; 35.6 × 27.9 cm. Courtesy of Helène Aylon Estate and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

She began creating a series of works that involved pouring linseed oil on paper or panel. It was all about relying on chance and the resultant transformation.

The cover of her 2012 memoir, “Whatever is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist” (The Feminist Press, 2012) shows the artist coming into her own with a full mane of untamed curly hair, dressed in black trousers and a black blouse with a deep V-neck. In the book she recounts how, as her mother instructed her to be a good girl, she was fermenting ground-breaking work that would be exhibited at Betty Parson’s Gallery, the Whitney, MoMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Andy Warhol Museum and the Jewish Museum.

“I was already developing an aesthetic during my preadolescence” and it didn’t include “schmaltz,” she writes. Along the way she met the likes of artist Mark Rothko (Reinhardt introduced her to Rothko, “who came from a similar background,” says Curator Federman. “She was inspired by the mystical underpinnings of his work, and the way it reveals itself over time”), critic Peter Schjeldahl, and playwright Edward Albee.

Federman, who is at work on a biography of gallerist Betty Parsons, met Aylon in 2014 when, as a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, she was facilitating a gift of Aylon’s work. “We met in a storage facility in San Francisco, where she kept work from the period when she lived in the Bay Area (1973-1982),” recounts Federman. “She had an aura about her; she often dressed in flowing robes and head wraps.”

Subsequently, as curator in modern and contemporary drawings at the Morgan Library in New York, Federman included Aylon’s work in an exhibition. “Many of her works from throughout her career were created using unusual materials and techniques on paper.”

In the mid-1960s, when her children were older, Aylon devoted herself to becoming an artist, taking a studio in the East Village and commuting from Brooklyn’s Borough Park. “She was living between worlds during this period. It was the feminist movement, however, that showed her a way forward and made her an activist as well as an artist.

“Like many women in the 1970s,” continues Federman, “Aylon attended consciousness-raising groups, which was one of the ways she connected with fellow artists and writers. She became involved with institutions around the feminist movement in Berkeley, California, where she moved in 1973.”

After teaching at San Francisco State and the Berkeley Feminist Institute, she earned a master’s degree in Women’s Studies/Art Education from Antioch College West in 1980. “Over the years, her collaborators included her students, as well as Mierles Laderman Ukeles, Howardena Pindell, Meredith Monk, and Susan Griffin. She was a loving and supportive friend, and many of her relationships stemmed from this fact.”

Helène Aylon (1931 – 2020; born, Brooklyn, NY; died, New York, NY), I Will Wait for the Landing, from the series Turnings, 2014. Chromogenic print mounted on board; 45.7 × 76.2 cm. Collection of Helène Aylon Estate, Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

In 1979, Betty Parsons Gallery gave Aylon a show. “Parsons was always open to new talent,” says Federman. “Aylon was beginning (a series of paintings that) encapsulated her desire to allow ‘the art to tell me something that I did not know.’ These were abstract works on paper that developed over time, like aging or scarring skin. Parsons… was spiritually inclined and often spoke of manifesting the ‘invisible presence’ in her own art. Aylon was very devoted to Parsons, who died in 1982.”

After the show at Parsons, Aylon fell into obscurity for about 40 years. “Aylon did not have a dealer again until shortly before her death,” says Federman. “Part of this owes to the fact that throughout the ’80s, she was taking her work outside the studio to create performances and other time-based actions and installations, which are not easily marketed. In the 1990s and 2000s, Aylon undertook a huge project addressing her complex relationship with Judaism (‘The G-d Project: Nine Houses without Women’). Many people encountered her for the first time in this context — for example, in the show Too Jewish?, at the Jewish Museum in 1996. It may have been difficult for those encountering this body of work to understand how it connects to her earlier art, but it does!”

In her memoir, Aylon writes “It was only at the age of 60 that I dared to ‘come out’ as a formerly Orthodox Jew.”

“She shifted her attention away from Orthodox practice and textual interpretation to a more mystical strain of Judaism, Kabbalah, which means ‘receiving,’” notes Federman. In California in the ’70s, she attended the Aquarian Minyan, a radical egalitarian community where Kabbalism was taught. “This allowed her to retain a connection with Judaism, which was an undeniable part of her formation.

“It was only later, after she had spent nearly a decade engaged in tikkun olam (repairing the world — a Kabbalistic idea) through her ecological activism, that she decided to go back to the source, and to take on the texts and practices that she found so problematic.”

In her video “Written Behind my Back,” the artist, shrouded in a white garment, appears against a white wall, as Hebrew words float across her. In the voice-over narration we hear: “Locusts will demolish you, worms will consume you because you have not obeyed. You will eat the flesh of your sons and daughters. He will bring back the Egyptian illnesses and plagues for you have not obeyed your god… your corpse will be free for all the birds in the sky and the animals.”

And, in English text across the screen: “When it became my turn to kiss you I turned my back on you. I could not see what was written behind my back. Once I was your Sabbath bride. Your words were strung like pearls. Now I carry your weight on my back.”

“Anyone who takes the time to familiarize themselves with Aylon’s art will be convinced that she was a major artist, brilliant in many ways, and deserving of the attention that largely eluded her,” says Federman. “She used her talents as an artist and her conviction as a feminist to illuminate the beauty of creation, the necessity of human connection, and the need for healing on every level: human, environmental, and spiritual.”



About the author: Driven by her love of the arts, and how it can make us better human beings, Ilene Dube has written for JerseyArts, Hyperallergic, WHYY Philadelphia, Sculpture Magazine, Princeton Magazine, U.S. 1, Huffington Post, the Princeton Packet, and many others. She has produced short documentaries on the arts of central New Jersey, as well as segments for State of the Arts, and has curated exhibitions at the Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie and Morven Museum in Princeton, among others. Her own artwork has garnered awards in regional exhibitions and her short stories have appeared in dozens of literary journals. A life-long practitioner of plant-based eating, she can be found stocking up on fresh veggies at the West Windsor Farmers Market.