Helène Aylon (1931-2020) was an eco-feminist visual, conceptual, and installation artist. Her work has been shown at the Whitney, The Jewish Museum (NY), the Aldrich in Connecticut, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, SFMOMA, the Ein Harod Museum in Israel, and The Warhol in Pittsburgh.
Her memoir, Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist, was published in 2012 by The Feminist Press.
Aylon started out as an abstract painter making process-based works. She considered female painters such as Grace Hartigan and Lee Krasner as influences on her and her work, and she absorbed from them an interest in testing what paints and dyes could do. In Aylon’s hand, these mediums are often blotchy and elusive, seeming to resemble forms that are in the process of shapeshifting.
Aylon showed with the famed New York dealer Betty Parsons early on. In an Artforum review of a 1975 show at the gallery, Roberta Smith wrote, “Despite all she leaves to chance and to the natural tendencies of her materials, she has developed her own special kind of control, as do most artists who start out with an unconventional technique. She achieves — or her paintings are currently achieving — a pleasing variety of rich brown and beige tones, lines, cracks, ripples and Rorschachian stains.”
After Parsons gave Aylon a show in 1979, the artist didn’t have another New York solo exhibition for 40 years, when Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects mounted a survey of works the artist made between 1969 and 1973. Marc Selwyn Fine Art gallery in Los Angeles staged an exhibition of her 1970s art in early 2020.
Aylon studied art at Brooklyn College, where artist Ad Reinhardt was her mentor. His advice, along with words from painter Agnes Martin, turned her toward abstraction, though it wasn’t until she went to San Francisco’s Antioch College to get an M.F.A. in women’s studies that she was “rescued by feminism,” as she put it. She read texts by Adrienne Rich and Maya Angelou, and discovered that she could be both a mother and an artist simultaneously.
In the later part of her career, she focused largely on her Jewish identity, considering the roles that female followers of the religion have played over the years. For a decades-long project called The Liberation of G-D, Aylon systematically went through the Old Testament to discover places where scripture had written women out of the narrative and preserved God’s masculine authority. At one point, she wrote, “Did God say these things to Moses, or are they patriarchal attitudes projected onto God? — as though man has the right to have dominion even over God.”
