Robin Bernstein’s Beauty and Terror

Robin Bernstein’s art show, a nine-year project composed of sixteen individual pieces, tells a story that will break and uplift your heart. My guess is that it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen, an invitation to look deeply into events of our blighted history and humanity. The show was recently shown at Transmission Gallery in Oakland from June 7 to July 20, and entitled, Beauty and Terror.  

Her medium is not paint, but embroidery thread (she calls it string) held together with wax, pine resin, and Vaseline that Bernstein uses to create patches of color that resemble brushstrokes on a backing of wood. “The wax smells like honey,” she said interviewed in  her Emeryville studio. She prefers to use vintage thread hunted down from flea markets and European sources for their richer colors.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Bernstein was studying pre-med as she embraced a career in art, doing a thirteen-year stint at Modesto Junior College as well as teaching at The Renaissance International School in Oakland. She perfected an unusual technique discovered while preparing students for a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico—the yarn paintings of the Huichol Indians that create brilliant designs of flowers and animals pressed into beeswax.  Bernstein began to experiment, first using a grandmother’s favorite teacup as a subject and then moving on to others subjects using “a chopstick to press the string, and a very sharp manicure scissors” as her tools of choice.

But Bernstein’s epiphany came when she worked on a piece about Berlin called “Rose Colored Glass,” which highlights how people can overlook the city’s two histories, pre- and post-World War II. 

The piece made her realize that “this working with wax could hold content. When someone pays close attention to something,” she said, “you want to pay close attention also.”

In an early piece called “A Nefarious Faith (2011),” she used string painting to create a triptych highlighting the issue of pedophiles in the church: Oliver O’Grady from Stockton, California, Bishop Vangheluwe, and Saint Athansius of Alexandria, a theologian born in 290. Bernstein began researching historical incidents, ones largely connected to the Shoah, using testimony, lectures, books, films, and academic sites as source material. Her research often brings her to tears,” she said, but once Bernstein begins a project, taking anywhere from three to four months, she begins her own healing. 

““You can’t forget what you don’t know”.” 

Bernstein recreates events, many that tell the story about how local Eastern European populations willingly collaborated with the Nazis to obliterate Jewish people living in their countries—like the string work “Iasi (2017),” which recounts how at the beginning of 1941 in this Rumanian town of 100,000, half of whom were Jewish, only 200 survived. 

The work is not limited to Holocaust subjects, but touches on the bigotry of our own era like “Frontman (2017),” or “Lamination (2011)” that celebrates peace and survival using the symbols of Islam and Judaism, or “Lorenzo’s Primo (2019),” that tells the story of survival.

Each piece finds its own form like Iasi, in the shape of medals that were given to the Nazis in appreciation of slaughtering Jews, or Babi Yar that uses a decorative border of flowers and folk designs, a bouquet of Beauty and Terror.