Bernstein is a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery—the first female artists gallery in the United States—and an early member of the Guerrilla Girls, Art Workers’ Coalition and Fight Censorship. In 2016, she received the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation annual fellowship and was elected a National Academician. In 2019, she was presented with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art.

Bernstein will be the subject of a major retrospective at Kunsthaus Zurich in 2026. She has staged solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York (2012), Studio Voltaire, London (2014), Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway (2016), and The Drawing Center, New York (2017), among other venues. Her work is collected by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich; Kunsthaus Zurich and the Yale University Art Gallery, among other museums.