Judith Bernstein: Public Fears

“Memorable visual impact is my main priority… I confront issues head-on.”
—Judith Bernstein

“The bellowing confrontation in Bernstein’s work, a combination of wit and outrage, is nothing if not timely.”
– Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times

A selection of works on paper spanning from Bernstein’s days at Yale in the 1960s to recent years will be featured, surveying celebrated series including the antiwar Fuck Vietnam (1966-67) and Union Jack-Off Flags (1967). Realized in protest of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, these works express Bernstein’s political dissent in the form of flags and jingoist imagery, riffing off of the crude and unfiltered humor of graffiti she observed in the men’s restrooms at Yale, during a time when the university only admitted male undergraduates. The grouping also includes a number of works from Bernstein’s Dick in a Head series (2010-2015). Sharing the fury and fervor of Fuck Vietnam while foreshadowing the ghostly faces of Death Heads, these works are emblematic of Bernstein’s life-long art practice of mining the subconscious. Nearby, 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.

Entering the gallery, a restaging of the artist’s iconic Signature Piece (1986) commandeers the facade of floor-to-ceiling windows—a steadfast declaration of Bernstein’s artistic presence by way of appropriating the male artistic ego. Nearby, the prophetic painting Money Shot - Yellow (2016) finds renewed fervor in the wake of another historic presidential election. It depicts the US Capitol in an incendiary appraisal of Donald Trump’s first administration, as if to foretell the insurrection by his supporters on January 6, 2020. 

Judith Bernstein: Public Fears creates a spectacle that transforms the current atmosphere of aggression and turns it into a weapon of critique. The exhibition serves as a testament to the raw resilience and unapologetic drive of an artist who has overcome censorship. In her words: “for me provocation is agitation and unveiling of serious issues with a sledgehammer. Memorable visual impact is my main priority… I confront issues head-on.”