Helène Aylon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hel%C3%A8ne_Aylon

Aylon was born on February 4, 1931, in Brooklyn, NY, to Anshel Greenfield, who ran a tie factory, and Etta (Scheinberg) Greenfield, a homemaker. She had two younger sisters: Sandy (b. 1936) and Linda (b. 1942). Aylon was raised as an Orthodox Jew, attending grade school at Shulamith School for Girls and a religious high school—although she had wanted to attend The High School of Music and Art (Aylon 2012: 40-2). While attending high school, she became engaged to a rabbinical student, Mandel H. Fisch (1926-1961). They married in 1949 and lived in Montreal, where Mandel was already serving as a rabbi. A year later Aylon gave birth to a son, Nathaniel, followed soon by a daughter, Renee Emunah; the couple returned to Brooklyn while Aylon was pregnant with Renee. She began studying art at Brooklyn College, under Ad Reinhardt, through whom she also met—and discussed Judaism and art—with Mark Rothko.

Aylon’s husband, after battling cancer for five years, died in 1961; Aylon was 30. Two years later, she volunteered to paint a mural for a community center in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn. When a New York Journal American newspaper reporter interviewed her, she said spontaneously that her name was Helène Aylon, adopting the Hebraized version of her first name as her surname. The artist’s first paid commission was a sixteen-foot mural for the Jewish chapel at New York’s JFK International Airport; Ruach (Spirit/Wind/Breath; 1965-1966) layered that word’s three Hebrew letters like a gigantic palimpsest embodying blueness, blackness, and redness. By 1970, she was showing work in one-person exhibits at the Max Hutchinson Gallery in SoHo.

Helène Aylon (née Greenfield; February 4, 1931 – April 6, 2020) was an American multimedia and eco-feminist artist.[1][2] 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.[2] She died during the COVID-19 pandemic, due to complications brought on by COVID-19.

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