Helène Aylon (née Greenfield; February 4, 1931 – April 6, 2020), was an American multimedia, eco-feminist artist, and educator.

[1][2][3] Prior to her husband's death, Aylon enrolled as an art student at Brooklyn College, where she studied under Ad Reinhardt.

[1][3] Aylon's first notable work, Rauch (Spirit, Wind, Breath) (1965), was a 16-foot mural, commissioned for the now-defunct Synagogue Library at JFK International Airport, that attempted to portray Judaism through the eyes of women.

She created a series called Paintings That Change (1974–77), which included Tar Pouring, Drifting Boundaries, Receding Beige, and Oval on Left Edge.

Next, she tilted the panels so that gravity would cause the oil to form a sac underneath the surface, which was subsequently allowed to break, again dependent largely on chance.

[11] This work consisted of an "ambulance" (a converted U-Haul van) that symbolized an attempt to save the world from nuclear war.

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.

[9][13] In 1995, Aylon's video of the "two sacs en route" to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was shown on the Sony Jumbotron in Times Square.

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.

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.

[15] 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.

[3] She also targeted words or phrases that conveyed a sense of vengeance, deception, cruelty, and misogyny that had been falsely attributed to God.

[18] 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.

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.

[21][22] 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.

As noted by Aylon, "The material I thought appropriate for the Partition that separates male and female worshippers is made of the ritual garb worn by religious men.

[28] "I petition the traditional bet din of three males to include women as judges," Aylon stated, adding, "I think of my work as a 'rescue' of the Earth and God and women—all stuck in patriarchal designations.