Bernette Rudolph was born in the Bronx in 1929, the daughter of a bookkeeper and a seamstress. At an early age, she displayed a talent for art. As a teenager, she attended the Educational Alliance in Manhattan, studying drawing under Abbo Ostrowsky. Later, she studied with Jack Tworkov, Seymour Lipton and Max Bechmann.. Consumed with the desire to become a professional artist, Bernette concentrated on printmaking and studied with Japanese master printmaker Shido Munakata. In 1959, she hosted Munakata at her home on the beach in the Far Rockaways; photos of her with her family and Munakata were published in Life magazine. Bernette developed and followed her own course of study as needed. She received her MFA from Pratt Institute in order to be formally qualified to teach. Her printmaking was done in her own studio as she felt it was superior to the facilities offered at Pratt and elsewhere.

Bernette’s early prints feature motherhood, children at play and family life. Later, more abstract prints celebrate fertility, the embryo, sexual relationship of the vagina and the penis, the seed, gestation, the birth process. Her compositions embody fluid, sensual and sexual abstract imagery, uniquely identifiable as her own style and process. While refusing to label herself within any category, Bernette Rudolph’s art celebrates those attributes of being a woman, if not a goddess, a Mother Earth symbol or simply a female creative, literally and spiritually. Indeed, Bernette’s prints, relevant in the 1960s and 1970s as expressions of female sexual being and empowerment, speak equally to our contemporary society.

By the early 1980s, Bernette shifted her focus to creating 3D wood sculptural pieces, having spent over twenty years as a printmaker.

ART RESUME

Bernette Rudolph has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums throughout the United States. A full resume can be obtained upon request by emailing Ms. Rudolph at: Bernette@earthlink.net

MEMOIR

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