Judith Bernstein

Judith Bernstein
Born	1942

Judith Bernstein (born October 14, 1942) is a New York artist best known for her phallic drawings and paintings. Bernstein uses her art as a vehicle for her outspoken feminist and anti-war activism, provocatively drawing psychological links between the two. Her best-known work features her iconic motif of an anthropomorphized screw, which has become the basis for a number of allegories and visual puns. During the beginning of the Feminist Art Movement, Bernstein was a founding member of the all-women's cooperative A.I.R. Gallery in New York.

Bernstein experienced a rediscovery late in her career, as highlighted in her New York Magazine’s 2015 profile titled “Judith Bernstein, an art star at last at 72.” She has addressed the topic of her rediscovery in an interview with The New York Times, stating “I call it a rebirth."

Throughout her life, Bernstein has also been involved in the Guerilla Girls, Art Workers' Coalition, and Fight Censorship Group. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Jewish Museum, Carnegie Museum, Neuberger Museum, Migros Museum Zürich, Kunsthaus Zürich, Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, Andy Hall Foundation, Alex Katz Foundation, and Verbund Collection.

Bernstein was born into a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey in 1942. Her mother was a bookkeeper and her father was a teacher. She learned about painting from her father who painted with his friends in their basement. She earned her Master of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees from Yale University. Bernstein recalls: “Jack Tworkov, the head of the art department, said to me on the first day, ‘We cannot place you.’ Meaning that after I left Yale, I wouldn’t get a job.” At that time, women were rarely placed in university positions. Prior to studying at Yale University, Bernstein received a M.Ed. and B.S. at the Pennsylvania State University.

Throughout Bernstein’s work there is playfulness within the repetition of a motif. Bernstein’s early drawings and paintings were influenced by both graffiti in men's bathrooms at Yale University and her view that paternalistic leadership resulted in the Vietnam War. She became fascinated with graffiti after reading an article in The New York Times in the ‘60s about Edward Albee taking the title Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf from bathroom graffiti. In discussing these images, Bernstein has stated: “I realized that graffiti has psychological depth because when someone’s alone and releasing on the toilet, they’re also releasing from the subconscious. I began to use text like ‘this may not be heaven but Peter hangs out here’ in my drawings and paired it with crude images.”Fun Gun (1967) is a painting of an anatomical phallus shooting bullets. The same year she created the Union Jack-Off series, made with charcoal and oil stick on paper. It features two phalluses in the shape of an X within the American flag with the words "Jack Off on U.S Policy in Vietnam."

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