An installation by the artist Helene Aylon on the exterior walls of the museum, consisting of lengths of knotted pillowcases hanging down the museum's concrete facade, commemorates the 50th anniversary of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Aylon's installation is derived from a decade-long project, originally conceived in 1980 in Berkeley, by which the artist sought to merge her artistic work with anti-nuclear activism. A central image of this body of work is the "sac," a term that Aylon uses to describe the material form of the pillowcase while simultaneously alluding to the acronym for Strategic Air Command, and to Aylon's own abiding theme, "survive and continue." Suzanne Lacy has written, "For (Aylon), the sack has developed into a universal symbol of women working together to gather essentials for survival and healing." In 1982 Aylon traveled to twelve nuclear weapons sites across the U.S., where she and hundreds of women collaborators filled pillowcases with "endangered earth." These sacks, inscribed with women's dreams, were transported in a vehicle she calls The Earth Ambulance to the United Nations in New York, where they were emptied and then hung on a clothesline across Dag HammarskjÖld Plaza. Other projects involving pillowcases included an exchange with women from the Soviet Union, an installation at the Seneca Women's Peace Encampment in upstate New York, and a project with women survivors of the Hiroshima blast that Aylon documented in the video piece Post--Script (1986). Aylon's pillowcase project has come to symbolize for many the communal, feminist ideals that developed within the anti-nuclear movement. The museum is pleased to welcome this work back to Berkeley, its place of origin, and let it eloquently speak to the tragic legacy of nuclear weapons and to the ongoing threat of their proliferation.
