Career Survey of Influential American Artist Helène Aylon on View at the Princeton University Art Museum

The exhibition will highlight works from the artist’s trailblazing 50-year career and her investigations of identity, activism, and spirituality 

PRINCETON, NJ – Helène Aylon: Undercurrent, an exhibition of more than twenty works from the artist’s fifty-year career, will open at the Princeton University Art Museum’s Art@Bainbridge gallery this fall (September 14 to February 2, 2025). The exhibition—the first to survey the artist’s work since her death in 2020—will explore the impact of feminism, ecological activism, and Orthodox Judaism on Aylon’s work. 

Aylon first gained renown in the 1970s for her innovative contributions to a movement called Process art. Honoring openness and receptivity as feminist values, Aylon used her practice to emphasize the act of creation over the final object. One such early work, Silvery Pane (1971), morphs depending on the viewer’s sightline. Aylon went on to become a leading ecofeminist artist in the 1980s, driving a truck she transformed into a work called Earth Ambulance across the United States. In her final decades, she created performances and installations that interrogated her Orthodox Jewish upbringing. The exhibition includes pieces from each of these pivotal points in the artist’s practice, ranging from 1971 to 2014. 

"Aylon deserves to be far more recognized than she is for her brilliant contributions to feminist and ecofeminist art,” said guest curator Rachel Federman. “Like many women in the 1970s, Aylon’s consciousness was raised, directing her to develop a visual language that was both abstract and feminist. While her work often took her out of the studio, she had a genius for transforming actions and performances into compelling objects that vibrate with her spirit of exploration.” 

Among the objects on view are documentary photographs from Terresti: “Rescued” Earth (1982), Aylon’s journey in Earth Ambulance, in which she set out to “rescue” earth from sites of nuclear research and development. Together with dozens of women from the art world and beyond, she collected soil in pillowcases on which women had written their dreams and nightmares for the planet. She called the pillowcases “sacs”—an acronym for both the Strategic Air Command bases where she gathered earth and the mantra “survive and continue.” 

The exhibition will also include a reimagining of Bridge of Knots (1995), Aylon’s installation of ropes of knotted pillowcases dangling along the facade of the Berkeley Art Museum to 

commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The pillowcases were the same used in Terrestri: "Rescued" Earth and other performances. Aylon envisioned these acts as an ongoing project, underscoring the open-ended nature of her practice. 

Also featured in the exhibition is work from the 1990s and 2000s in which Aylon explored aspects of her Orthodox Jewish upbringing through a feminist lens. The Book That Will Not Close (1999) belongs to a larger body of work in which Aylon inserted vellum sheets between the pages of the five Books of Moses. She used a pink marker to highlight passages of cruelty or misogyny, also inserting a pink line to demarcate feminine absence. 

“Helène Aylon’s work exemplifies the ways in which art can investigate our connections to body, earth, and spirituality,” said James Steward, Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director of the Princeton University Art Museum. “Having first encountered the artist’s work at Berkeley in the 1990s, where I was curating at the time, I am delighted by the opportunity to reinterrogate Aylon’s career and bring it to new audiences.” 

Helène Aylon: Undercurrent is curated by Rachel Federman, an independent curator and writer who has previously worked at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She is currently writing a biography of the art dealer Betty Parsons.