 My name is Rebecca Taffel and I work at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation with Dr. Sackler. And I'm so delighted to be here today, so welcome Helen. It's a real thrill and an honor and it's just fantastic. So for the past five years the Center has been here at the Brooklyn Museum and we continue to fulfill our commitment to the past, present and future of feminist art. Using its award-winning exhibition in education spaces, the Sackler Center strives to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions. Dialogue and debate about feminist art, theory and activism take place at the Sackler Center Forum and groundbreaking exhibitions are held in its feminist art and her story galleries. If you haven't had a chance I highly recommend going and checking out the Rachel Neybone exhibition regarding Rodin and newspaper fiction The New York Journalism of Juno Barnes. They're really interesting and fascinating. But more than just a gallery space, the Center is a place for open and free discourse conversation and the exchange of ideas. It was Dr. Sackler's vision to celebrate dialogue and debate. Dr. Sackler couldn't be here today, she has some ongoing health issues, but she asked me to express how delighted she is to have Helen here at the Center and to share her story and to celebrate the launch of her book, which we have here available after she speaks. Whatever is contained must be released. My Jewish Orthodox girlhood, my life as a feminist artist. It's a fascinating read, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I suggest picking one up yourself. Helen Ilan is a visual, conceptual and installation artist and eco-feminist whose work has been exhibited around the world including the Whitney Museum and the Jewish Museum in New York, the Aldrich Museum in Connecticut, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. In 2012, she was part of a groundbreaking exhibit in Israel, Matronita, Jewish feminist art, works by women who come from a traditional Jewish background. Helen turned 80 this year, which is just wonderful. And I encourage you to visit her website, HelenIlan.com as well. So please help me welcome her to the front. Okay, I'm going to show you some slides to give you a context. And then we're going to see a very brief video of an installation in Washington D.C. and then I'm going to read from the book. I'm going to read different parts. I never do the same selections to each venue. They're always different just in case you want to come back again. Well, here is the family, my mother, my mother in the center there, always in the center. And here is my father in the second row all the way to the right, to my right, the handsome guy. In between, there's a pink line because I used to stare at this photograph all the time as a child because it was in the same bedroom that I shared with my baba, my grandmother. But I always thought something's missing. And many, many, many years later, I put some pink lines there. Here is baba right there at the kitchen table. And then jumping way ahead when I left Brooklyn for New York and New York for California and I made drifting boundaries so you could see that it's a painting that changes. Here it is many months later. I'll show you how it looked before. Oh, that's another one. This one here, I would pour oil on a panel on the floor and let the oil coagulate. This is in Berkeley. And then I would have women come and lift it up and let gravity make the change. Let gravity make all the oil, the wet oil underneath, cascade down and fill in its own sack. And that liquid sack like an amniatic sack would burst or gush or drizzle. Here's the sack. Oddly, I was not in any of those feminist art shows and I would say this is rather feminist, but that's another story. Okay, so maybe I was very far away. I was in Berkeley, Berserkley, and here is my studio there, full of newspapers that worked because it was always so full of oil, it was spilling and gushing. And it was at the time of the conceptual art when everything was so neat. But mine was messy. So all of these are waiting to get some kind of a skin forming on top, a thick skin perhaps. Betty Parsons, my dealer, and I'm going to read a little bit about her to you. She came to see this. This is when I showed it in New York and for some reason they all looked like jagged edges there. It was in a place that's now called White Columns, then it was called 112 Workshop. And here's another breaking that's called Holted Boundary. And you see how it just gushes out, breaking with erratic spread. And then later on, after the breakings, I just did not know just what to do after that. It was too metaphoric. I went to the land and you could see me just very small, very tiny. And that was the beginning of ecofeminism when I really saw the correlation of the woman, the woman's body to the land. I wandered near echoing caves. It was more than that. I was not sure exactly what it was, but I was looking for my foremothers. The sack idea happened after that, the iconic sack and the pillowcase of the 80s. My life, sort of, my career is really divided in three, really, basically. It was the body and the body of the land, the earth, and then God's, a God project. Each one took ten years to do and except God, I lingered for twenty years with that one. So here's the sack. And here is when I performed this in California at the Women's Building of San Francisco. San carrying. So the liquid sack became sand sacks. And then the sand sacks, because they were so willingly carried, I felt I'm going to try this with women from warring nations. And so in Israel, Arab and Jewish women actually carried stone sacks, which was more appropriate for Israel. It was the time of the beginning of the Intifada. Here it is in artist space. And here I'm asking that question, hey, can an artist do something? Can an artist really do something? I squiggled some oil paint around a stone that we gathered, and then I saw that the stone got darker in time. And here came earth, and then that's the beginning of the earth ambulance. Here's when I first started going to live a more weapons lab in California to rescue the earth, like I would later rescue God from patriarchy. Here's the earth ambulance and the Native American women who was one of the first people we visited for kind of some kind of spiritual sustenance. One of them came along with us in burnt sage. I may read a little bit about that. Oh, here's the earth ambulance, and we're wearing this, the poster, which is made of cloth, which became a tallest. If you know what that is, it's a Jewish prayer shawl, so that we would all be dressed alike, no matter what. Here is, here I am at the UN with that tallest and bringing the earth that was carried on stretchers. Here you could see it was hung up on July 4th, 1982. You can see that long line, and then in 19, oh, here is a line drawing, one of a series from the block long line. And here is the earth ambulance at creative time in the Brooklyn Bridge, 1992. Here at Seneca, here's the stretched canvas, and it's the canvas with the blood stains washed away with white gesso. You know, I think it's funny because I don't seem to be ending here. There's so much more. Here's unstressed canvas. Okay, I think I'll just go one way. You will see in the video what the pillowcase is full of rescued earth from the sack bases look like at this museum. The other one was the Berkeley Museum, and this is the American University Museum of Washington, D.C., and then came my work in Japan where the two sacks full of seeds went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then 10 years later, because everything takes 10 years, it was shown in Times Square. And I asked, what would you carry? What would you take in your sack? Okay, oh, well, here's the liberation of God. Here's the highlighting, highlighting and highlighting for six years very carefully, and then that went all over. And then my grandmother, I always asked, what would she have thought? Would she have held my cheek in her palm and said, Hindala Matournes, Helene, you mustn't. Or would she have said, the life's a God showing sight. Thanks be to God, it's about time. So I think now that you have some kind of an idea, I am going to show, yes, I am going to show Bridge of Knots because for 10 years, let me see, this was in 2006, all the pillowcases that were filled with earth and were emptied at the United Nations then got shown in different museums, and this was an American University Museum of Washington, D.C. that George Bush was the president then and that he would just somehow drive by it. But I never heard from him. I should have told you that Meredith Monk, that's her audio for this piece. I'm going to speak from the back, but I wanted to say that I showed Bridge of Knots on the facades earlier in the Knoxville Museum of Art and also in the Berkeley Museum, but I only filmed it when the pillowcases came down in 2006. The others were in 1993 and 1995. It alludes to, many people think, post 9-1-1 and the fragility of our dreams. I'm going to read little bits here and there. If you really want a special part, you can tell me and I'll read about any subject. Okay, Borough Park. The house we rented for 80 years was on the same block where the annual Simcha Torah, Joy of Torah holiday dancing took place. Our street, 47th Street, was the time square of Borough Park. The police barriers that were erected during the holiday to block traffic from entering the street were completely unnecessary. Is this working? Yeah, okay. Because the streets were automatically emptied of cars on Chavez and Jewish holidays. After all, the entire neighborhood was Orthodox. My mother, Edda, had an easy comradeship with every storekeeper in the neighborhood. From an early age, she had been known as Ita de Gitta. Edda, the good one. Whenever I was on a stalemate with my pesty younger sister or sulking about one thing or another, mother would say, you be the good one. But ask anyone who knows my mother who could be as good as Ita de Gitta. The main thing, you should be with nice people, she always said. Mom, I told her in 1971, I am in the Whitney Museum. It's a show called Lyrical Abstraction. The main thing, you should be with nice people. The nice Hamish storekeepers sent their nice Jewish daughters to Shulamath School for Girls on 49th Street. Shulamath was named for the Comely Princess in King Solomon's Song of Songs. They sent their nice Jewish boys to the Echayim Yashiva, named for the Tree of Life, which was around the corner on 13th Avenue and 50th Street. The young Israel Shul was down the block on 50th and the tiny homey shul called the Stebel where Baba, my grandmother, would pray. That was on 52nd Street. Now, I'm not going to go right now, but it goes on and on where the fish store was, where the shoe store was, etc. But I'll continue now when I'm 13 years old. At age 13, before graduation, was upon us at Shulamath School, I brazenly announced that I was going to be an artist and that I would go to the music and art high school in Manhattan. I got this idea from watching an older girl named Dolores and her friend Betty Grossman draw pictures sitting on the porch two doors down. They made it seem sophisticated, even glamorous. I wonder if Betty Grossman realizes how she influenced my life. I read somewhere that she became a recluse living in the Chelsea Hotel. I never could summon the courage to ask if I could walk up the steps to see their drawings, but I went home and made my own drawing of a bearded Hasidic rabbi, Davening, which I copied from an oversized book on Pirkei Ava, Ethics of the Fathers, the one art book in our home. I did another drawing of my Uncle Dave with his curled salvo dordale mustache copied from an elaborate portrait of him, set against Roman columns. I also drew my sleeping baby sister Linda, whom I used as a still model when I babysat on Saturday nights while mother and daddy went to visit Uncle Morris and Aunt Molly. Mother kept my drawings under glass on the bridge table so she could show them to company. Maybe that's enough of that. There's a lot more about that. You'll see. Okay, I think I'm going to go very far now. In the summer of 1973, I met with the art dealer Betty Parsons in her bridge Hampton summer home to show her my work. I came with only the very first of my paintings that changed in time, the smallest. I wasn't going to show up schlepping a big package in my usual bag lady persona. She looked at my tiny painting, and without a moment's hesitation, in her deep Tallulah Baghead voice, she declared, this is very large. I loved it too. Betty traveled to my Berkeley studio to see more of my work, bringing her friend, the playwright Edward Albee, who ignored the paintings on the walls and went straight for my file drawers without permission. I want to see what you're really about. He had the nerve to say by way of explanation, but there were no clues to the meaning of my art in the drawer, just sanitary napkins, as Albee discovered. Betty showed paintings that changed in time in 1975. I could never discuss feminist theory with Betty. She thought my inspiration for the paintings came from the West Coast, but she did not see the feminist inherent in the work. The way in which paintings that changed in time played with role reversals. With these works, the collector was deriving the excitement of the work in progress instead of the artist. They were about process rather than completion, which I think of as feminist. Betty's action painting was emerging and masculine, inseparable from the American dream. She had an imperialist attitude about American art, seeing the link between the action painting of the 50s and American expansionism. There's a strong correlation in her attraction to the legendary aspects of the cowboy-esque Jackson Pollock and her attraction to the American frontier mystique. Picasso could never have done what Jackson did, she insisted. Jackson threw down the walls. Well, Betty gave me a second show, Formations, in 1979. Let's see. I sort of explained what this all was, but I write about it here again. With the wet oil beneath the panels lay prone for months until the outer skin was thick and set. Then I would lift the panels upright to midwife the paintings with other women. I invited to the studio. I called these Formations breaking the breakings. Each time a panel was ready to be lifted, I announced to the other midwives whatever is contained must be released. You are to initiate the breaking, and I will accept it. I figured even if I didn't like something, it will change anyway again, so it may get bitter. And of course, that was about aging, too. Okay, let's see. The women then raised the panel and leaned it against the wall. The wet oil would pull beneath the dry skin forming a sack, and the sack heavy with oil would break before my eyes. Sometimes the liquid would gush, sometimes it drizzled, sometimes it dripped. It's possible that the prayer my barber taught me and my childhood, the one I recited each time I left the bathroom influenced the breakings. But I could not bring myself to say that to anyone in the art world. These words, you may have known that prayer. It's about apertures, apertures. And if one should open when it should be closed, and one should close when it should be open, we cannot stand before you, meaning God. These words allotted to the visceral body that makes us live or die as opposed to the idealized body of the dominant culture that encourages us to stare at parts of the body, never seeing the whole miracle. And then I talk on, and then at the end I say, and like Georgia O'Keeffe, who insisted that the vulva imagery in her work was merely floral, I used dry conceptual terms to describe this very wet, orgasmic process art. I intentionally did make paintings that change through natural means, much as a plant that grows, a face that wrinkles, a scar that heals. Okay, a little bit more time, let's see. Okay, the sack, and trying to be less metaphoric. Now in the 80s, that was 70s, 80s. I had been thinking of photos of refugees, images of women fleeing with their sacks, of precious belongings on one hand clasping a child's hand in the other. If only we could take our most precious belonging, the earth itself, and all its variety and carry it to safety. The same instinct to confront the military was also motivating women in Europe. They were leaving their homes to set up tents alongside army bases in Greenham Common, England, and in Comiso, Italy. And in the US, American women would buy land adjacent to the Seneca Army Depot in Romulus, New York in order to camp out and watch what was going on. I was no longer teaching painting and drawing in San Francisco State University since I had not received tenure. There were only two women on the art faculty, me and a woman who taught jewelry making. My style did not mesh with the rest of the department. They explained, maybe they did not like it when I had a black model posed with her baby as the Madonna and Child in my life drawing class, and then plastered all the drawings in the halls on Christmas Eve. Or maybe they did not like that I got very close to the students. But really, how could, where am I? How could I critique their work without knowing just what it was that drove them? I would quote Agnes Martin. Helplessness is the most important state of mind for an artist. And I listened to the advice of Louise Nevelson, who said the first thing she did when she taught art was quote, not to teach art. An article I wrote for the Journal Visual Dialogue titled, Academia and the Fear of Feminism, was certainly the last straw. But not getting tenure turned out to be a blessing instead of some dreary art department where cronyism was the mode. I taught a course titled Performance Art as Anti-War Strategy at the Feminist Institute. Three of my students joined me when I rented a truck, painted a large red cross on both sides over white contact paper and slapped the words Earth Ambulance on the front. Do we have more time or yes? Okay, a little bit more. I plan to find more women to travel with me across nuclear America based on the War Resistors League map showing the military sites across the states. Taking turns driving a van and the ambulance, we would arrive at each site and rescue earthen pillowcases, both our own pillowcases and ones brought by women who live near the site. Our destination was the UN mass rally for disarmament scheduled for June 12, 1982. At each military site along the way, we would be keeping watch, peering through fences into the eyes of the men in their camouflage uniforms on the other side, trying to persuade them to quit the military. Oh, and then it goes on with that map that was all these... I mean, they were open stars for weapons research, colored stars for weapon stockpiles, and our men military reactors. A ten-pointed star meant nuclear waste, a colored circle meant the reactor was operating, an open circle meant the reactor was being built, a green diamond meant nuclear fuel processing, and an outline diamond indicated uranium mining site my eyes began to blur. You might as well take the most scenic route, Fay said, and drew a straight line along the Pacific Coast from Livermore SAC, SAC Strategic Air Command, you get that, in the Bay Area to Vandenberg SAC at Southern California. And that's the Earth Ambulance. And then, well, the last thing was the God Project, which you know about, but that took 20 years. And right now, I'm still dealing with my foremothers, and I'm doing turnings, which you'll see in the book. I'm seeing myself as a foremother to tell you the truth. Thank you. Yes. Foremothers are our entire heredity, what they say in Hebrew, Yerusha. It's all the mothers that we don't know. All the mothers that we don't know, the great Maimonides, what did Mrs. Maimonides think, for example, et cetera, all the way, way back. We don't have a record of them, and it's a big tragedy. Yes. Well, actually, everything sort of goes back to Borough Park and my mother somehow because she wanted me to read to her because she was going blind. And she only wanted me to read from the portion of the week. I wanted to read a novel, no. So I was hyperventilating every time I saw all the problematic, sexist, misogynistic, specious, vengeful words that I don't think God said. So I felt, uh-uh, God didn't say this. And if somebody said that my father had said these words, I would say, my father would say, two men lying together shall be killed or this or that or whatever. No way. So why shouldn't I say this about supposedly the father in heaven? So I started highlighting. Anybody? Yes. What was written on? Oh, that's such a good question. I should have told you. I asked women to write their dreams and nightmares about nuclear war. And then I went to the Soviet Union at the time of the Cold War, the highest point of the Cold War when I went there and asked women from the Soviet Union to write their dreams and nightmares. We were about to blow each other up. And we just all burst out laughing. And we just said, we were showing each other the photographs of our children and grandchildren. And we were saying, is this a communist baby? Is this a capitalist baby? I mean, that's what we did. We just dreamed nightmares. Highlighting is just taking a pink marker. And yes, but not doing it on the text, being very respectful, covering it with vellum, transparent parchment-looking paper. And then highlighting. Just no comment. Just no comment, because everybody is their own midrashist. Everybody could make their own midrash. I just pointed it out for them to think about. Yes? Is that it? Well, you know, it's such a good question, again, because all the issues don't go away. They're very important at a certain time. And then suddenly there's another issue. We can't forget about disarmament. You know, that was the nuclear freeze movement. All of that was happening. And now we're not doing it. And it's still here. But that's a very good problem. I mean, a question to raise. Yes? Well, the feminist movement lives. It's the greatest nonviolent revolution that ever was. That's how I feel about it. And just, it's here to stay. There weren't many artists, I hardly know any, who were dealing with disarmament. There weren't that many artists. They were dealing with other problems. But there's so much, and it's going to continue. And I just hope that the new generation also looks back at what all the others have done before. It's, again, that form other thing. G-D, that little pink dash sums up the 20 years of the God project, that pink dash. And it can be applied to everything, not only the name in God, supposedly that is missing the feminist impulse, but everything else. Yes? Unfinished work? Yes. I hope so. I want to. Yeah, no, I'm not. It's the unfinished symphony. All our lives are unfinished symphony. We have to keep going as long as we can. Anything else? Well, okay, thank you.