American, b. 1942
Judith Bernstein’s bottomless appetite for the profane is likely to provoke even today’s audiences. Her work--often sexually explicit and unabashedly political--explores a wide range of culturally relevant issues that many of her contemporaries have shied away from depicting. Falling in line with other “Prick Art” artists of the 1970s, Bernstein employs large-scale phallic imagery, profane writing, and a variety of other crude elements in high-contrast colors to her paintings, drawings, and sculpture. Inspiration for such subject matter initially sprung from the graffitied bathroom walls of Bernstein’s alma mater, the Yale School of Art. The scatological dialogue in pictures and words on the walls of the men’s bathrooms divulged a certain aspect of the male psyche that Bernstein saw to be useful to her artwork. Several of Bernstein’s creations echo the raw, graffiti-like aesthetic that she had found so fascinating in the Yale men’s bathrooms. Using similar imagery and language, Bernstein voices explicit anti-war sentiments and offers a feminist critique of masculinity, including the destructive qualities therein.
Born in 1942 in Newark, New Jersey, Bernstein gained an early interest in painting during her childhood, when she would sit in on her father’s Sunday painting sessions. She received both her Bachelor’s in Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from Yale University, in addition to receiving her M.Ed. and B.S. from Pennsylvania State University.
Born in 1942 in Newark, New Jersey, Bernstein gained an early interest in painting during her childhood, when she would sit in on her father’s Sunday painting sessions. She received both her Bachelor’s in Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from Yale University, in addition to receiving her M.Ed. and B.S. from Pennsylvania State University.
