BELIEVING IS SEEING
An artist in collision.
Barbara Romain treated the world as material.
Music, language, jokes, grief, politics, religion, city streets, memory, the female body—whatever she heard, remembered, loved, or argued with could enter the work. She painted to music, wrote into paintings, moved between performance and public art, and let accidents remain when they knew more than the plan.
Then, in 1984, already an established painter, Barbara was declared legally blind. What followed was not a retreat, but a reinvention of how painting itself could be made.
She kept working for another four decades.
Barbara died in 2024, leaving behind hundreds of works—and a much larger story still being uncovered.
Barbara Romain, photographed with Spirits of Romaine Street Gather for a Backyard BBQ.
Acrylic collage on canvas, 72 × 48 in.,
UNDERSTANDING BARBARA
She was the argument.
Nude onstage in Hollywood. Dresses made from tampons. A national Seventeen spread. A televised debate about censorship and the arts. Teaching inner-city youth. Barbara moved between painting, performance, teaching and provocation without asking permission to stay in one category.
She took on sex, shame, religion, politics, racism, grief and the female body—and refused to make any of it polite. After becoming legally blind in 1984, she reinvented how she worked without allowing blindness to become the explanation for the work.
The paintings were only part of the story.
“I was a painter prior to my vision loss, and have had to reinvent my process of working since.”
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HER PORTFOLIO
What the work kept circling.
Barbara Romain’s paintings resist a single visual language. Across decades, figures give way to symbols, flowers to text, animals to memory, landscapes to music. Explore the work by subject and see how the familiar became something else in her hands.
THE ESTATE OPENS
Collect her work.
Barbara left over 400 paintings and mixed-media pieces, and over 100 ceramic vessels, alongside works on paper, ceramics, public projects, performance material, writings and recordings. The paintings remain the center of the estate: the place where language, sound, bodily gesture and memory repeatedly converged.
The Estate is making only a very limited selection available as Estate Editions and museum-quality fine art prints. These are among Barbara Romain’s most iconic, exhibited and celebrated works—paintings that defined major bodies of her practice, earned recognition, and traveled through exhibitions over decades.
LIMITED ESTATE EDITIONS
Our limited editions offer a rare way for these works to enter private collections. Each painting is issued once, as an Estate Edition of only 25 archival prints at the work’s original size — handstamped, numbered, and signed by the Estate with a Certificate of Authenticity.
First Releases
Most original works remain with the Estate for preservation, research, and exhibition. Selected originals may occasionally become available for acquisition through the Estate website or partner galleries.
ORIGINAL ARTWORKS
Barbara Romain, photographed with Hard Rain, 2007.
Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 72 × 72 in.
