The Jewish Museum
Thursday, March 26, 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Join us for a conversation among the trailblazing feminist artists Judith Bernstein, Joyce Kozloff, and Joan Semmel, moderated by Rachel Corbett, the author and arts journalist, as they reflect on their decades-long friendship and shared experiences coming up in the New York art world together. Semmel is the subject of the Jewish Museum’s current exhibition Joan Semmel: In the Flesh (on view through May 31, 2026), for which she selected works from the Museum’s collection to be in dialogue with her revolutionary paintings of nude figures. Bernstein and Kozloff are both highlighted in this presentation, demonstrating the importance of relationships between artists over the course of their careers.
About the speakers:
Judith Bernstein is renowned for her bold, psychological, and provocative artworks that fuse the sexual with the political with incisive feminist and political critique. Bernstein is a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery and an early member of the Guerrilla Girls, Art Workers’ Coalition, and Fight Censorship. In 2016 Bernstein was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Her work is widely collected. Recent solo exhibitions include Hard, New Museum, New York (2012), Cabinet of Horrors, Drawing Center, New York (2017), and her forthcoming monographic exhibition at Kunsthaus Zurich (2027).
Joyce Kozloff has been an activist in the feminist art movement on both coasts since 1970. She was a member of the Pattern & Decoration group in the 1970s and has worked with cartography, in its many permutations, since 1990. Mapping is a structure through which she explores the range of human knowledge and the imposition of imperial will. Her work has been exhibited and collected widely. A major solo exhibition, Joyce Kozloff: Contested Territories, is currently on view at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York through April 5, 2026.
Joan Semmel, one of the great figurative painters of our time, reimagines the possibilities of the nude through an embodied female perspective. She first emerged as a fiercely independent force in the 1970s, becoming known for her luminously colored canvases, created on an ambitious scale, and for her sensuous, yet unsparing approach to the body. Her work continues to challenge our views on beauty, desire, and aging well into the twenty-first century. Semmel’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Skin in the Game, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (2021) and Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (2022). Her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
Rachel Corbett is a features writer at New York magazine specializing in arts and culture. She is the author of You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin (Norton, 2016), which won the Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing, and The Monsters We Make (Norton, 2025). She has previously written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and other publications.