After retiring from SUNY Purchase, she 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".
[10] 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.
[11] She became fascinated with graffiti after reading an article in The New York Times in the 1960s about Edward Albee taking the title Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
One of these works, Horizontal (1973), was censored from the exhibition "Focus: Women's Work— American Art in 1974" at the Museum of the Philadelphia Civic Center for "lacking redeeming social value", phraseology commonly applied to pornography.
At the time, a petition letter was issued in protest, signed by many significant artists, critics, and curators, including Clement Greenberg, Linda Nochlin, Lucy Lippard, Louise Bourgeois, and the New Museum's Founding Director, Marcia Tucker.
[7] In 1975 Bernstein was a panelist for a radio program about women "erotic" artists for WBAI-New York, where she discussed her experiences creating and showing her work.
[17] Because of pervasive sexism in the art industry, it was difficult to land exhibition engagements, and Bernstein had a hard time gaining recognition for her artwork until the 21st century.
Fluorescent color and rich oil paint portrayed the chaos and nuclear explosion that is the Big Bang with rage and the expanding universe.
[10][25][26] In a review of Dicks of Death, Art Observed stated: "The exhibition has a unique focus on delivering Bernstein’s new body of work alongside a selection of historic pieces from the ‘60s and ‘70s, when politics related to the civilian body were making headlines, especially in relation to the protests over the Vietnam War and the resultant force expended on the populace.
Signifying the artist’s decades of resilient and enduring practice, this note additionally affirms how little progression has been made regarding the issues Bernstein has been tackling, even if the scenes and players have changed.
"[25] She also launched her first artist book titled Dicks of Death in collaboration with Edition Patrick Frey and received the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts in 2016 .