Judith Bernstein b. 1942
“Memorable visual impact is my main priority… I confront issues head-on.”
—Judith Bernstein
Judith Bernstein has developed a reputation as one of the most unwaveringly provocative artists of her generation. For nearly 60 years, her work has explored connections between the political and the sexual. Steadfast in her cultural, political, and social critique, Bernstein surged into art world prominence in the early 1970s with her monumental anti-war and feminist charcoal drawings of penis-screw hybrids-one of the artist's most recognizable motifs. She has lived and worked in New York since receiving her MFA from Yale in 1967.
Bernstein's iconic series of large-scale phallic screws, developed during Vietnam War, have been described as “masterpieces of feminist protest” by Ken Johnson for The New York Times, since becoming one of her most recognizable motifs. Bernstein’s dedication to her charcoal screws never wavered, even after a Philadelphia museum refused to exhibit a related work in 1974 despite protest from Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin, Louise Bourgeois and many other prominent artists, curators, and critics. The once-censored Horizontal (1973) was acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023.
Bernstein’s Word Drawings (1989-2009) burst with the same energy in their resolute exaggerations of the artist’s handwriting. The series, which debuted to the public at The Drawing Center in 2017, depict nonsequitous single words or phrases that become richly imbued with associative meaning when divorced from context.
Bernstein’s most recent painting series, Death Heads, adopts an inward-looking gaze and offers an introspective meditation on the sublimity of death. Distinguished from her earlier, more outwardly polemical works, these iconographic heads appear at once transfixed in awe and in a state of active alarm, reflecting the tension fundamental to the poetic dyad of life and death. The paintings draw on the same gestural movements of Bernstein’s earlier screws and their use of serial repetition, yet they employ less tongue-in-cheek double entendre and more art historical and cultural nods to the past—from Edvard Munch to M17 gas masks.
Bernstein is a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery-the first female artists gallery in the United States-and an early member of the Guerrilla Girls, Art Workers' Coalition and Fight Censorship. In 2016, she received the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation annual fellowship and was elected a National Academician. In 2019, she was presented with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art.
museum exhibitions & collections
Bernstein will be the subject of a major retrospective at Kunsthaus Zurich in 2026. She has staged solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York (2012), Studio Voltaire, London (2014), Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway (2016), and The Drawing Center, New York (2017), among other venues. Her work is collected by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich; Kunsthaus Zurich and the Yale University Art Gallery, among other museums.