Judith Bernstein

"For me provocation is agitation and unveiling serious issues with a sledgehammer."

–– Judith Bernstein, 2016

Judith Bernstein is an artist who has engaged in social and political critique since the late 1960s, frequently deploying sexual imagery as a means of mocking and combatting masculine power and aggression.

Though Bernstein made art from a young age, she recalled that her parents "did not want me to go to school unless I specifically had some training to make a living." Consequently, she earned a BS and MEd in art education at The Pennsylvania State University (1963, 1964), even as she continued to create art, often experimenting with language and calligraphy. After graduation, Bernstein chose to pursue painting, earning an MFA from Yale University, where, in her words, “the world opened up.”

While at Yale, Bernstein began making paintings inspired by the crass imagery and language of graffiti that she found in men's bathrooms, drawing connections between male sexual aggression and American militarism in response to the escalating American war in Vietnam. "I wanted things to be shocking and in your face," she claimed, "nothing could be cruder or more horrifying than the Vietnam War." After moving to New York City in the early 1970s, Bernstein joined the Art Workers' Coalition, an artist-led antiwar group that also addressed art world discrimination.

As the decade unfolded, Bernstein made monumental charcoal drawings of phallic, weapon-like screws. Responding to the minimalist aesthetics of repeated, industrial forms dominant in the New York art world at the time, her forms highlight the relentless nature of oppressive patriarchal power systems––the way they continually "screw." She also noted, "I want what the phallus stands for. I want all the access to the system, to be heard, to be validated." In 1972, Bernstein became a founding member of the A.I.R. Gallery, a New York City all-women's cooperative, where she presented her first solo exhibition in 1973.

While committed to feminist politics, Bernstein's phallic subject matter often positioned her at odds with feminist contemporaries who privileged self-representation and feminine imagery. She found common cause with artists like Anita Steckel and Louise Bourgeois through the Fight Censorship Group, which was founded in 1973 to advocate for women artists' right to depict sexual material. In subsequent decades, Bernstein continued viewing her practice and activism as "one package" and joined the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group combating art world sexism and racism.

During the 1980s, Bernstein responded to the AIDS epidemic in drawings, and she made wall-sized work featuring her enlarged signature that was, in her words, "about ego, about men's posturing, and about my own ego." In the 1990s, Bernstein began a series in which each work consists only of a carefully selected word, inviting reflection on its multiple meanings and political stakes—such as Freedom (1995, SAAM) and Equality (2021, SAAM). Bernstein continued addressing charged subjects in the first decades of the 2000s, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Donald Trump presidency, and the nefarious power dynamics of gaslighting. In the 2010s, she sought to "express the rage and the complexity of women" by working frankly with the vagina and the motif of the black hole, drawing connections between birth and the big bang.

Across her career, Bernstein's confrontational works have skewered existing systems through combinations of vivid colors, wordplay, sexual imagery, and her signature sense of humor. "It's very hard to make a career with work that is raw, political, sexual," Bernstein acknowledged in 2019. "That doesn't mean that you shouldn't try."

Authored by Katherine Markoski, American Women's History Initiative Writer and Editor, 2024