Judith Bernstein and her work share a striking trait: a potent brew of provocative humor edged with anger. An indelible cackle with a crackle, as powerfully expressed in vividly hued paintings strewed with tart, topical text.

“I never toned down anything,” Bernstein said in an obvious understatement. The artist found early inspiration in the graffiti she saw scrawled in the men’s room at Yale, where she was a graduate student in the 1960s. She quickly understood that scatology could be used in the service of satire, making it her trademark trope and putting her own spin on political caricature.

She made her mark in the early 1970s with large-scale charcoal-drawn screws — hairy phalluses as lethal projectiles — that were offshoots of the smaller penile images she incorporated into the anti-Vietnam War drawings and paintings she did at Yale.

But after her first few shows at A.I.R., the feminist gallery she founded with fellow artists Susan Williams, Nancy Spero, Agnes Denes and Howardena Pindell, among others, Bernstein found herself alienated from not only the male art world, but also from her feminist cohorts, who objected to the use of male genital imagery, even to fight the patriarchy.

When her work “Horizontal” (1973), an image of a huge screw, was censored from a 1974 show of women’s art at the Philadelphia Civic Center Museum — the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired it in 2023 — she was rarely exhibited for 30 years or so. She resurfaced at the New Museum in 2012 in a show aptly titled “Judith Bernstein: HARD,” with her signature boldly painted on the lobby windows.