HER PROCESS
Color. Language. Sound. Memory.
A song could become a structure. A sentence could become a mark. A stencil could replace a line she could no longer reliably draw. Barbara kept changing the method without abandoning the work.
The Estate is now preserving and reconstructing that record, while bringing the paintings forward for audiences who did not encounter them during her lifetime.
Barbara Romain, photographed with Spirits of Romaine Street Gather for a Backyard BBQ.
Acrylic collage on canvas, 72 × 48 in., 1996.
HER ESTATE
Why Barbara Now
Barbara passed in early 2024. The public record never fully gathered Barbara’s practice into one place. Painting, performance, teaching, public art and language were often encountered separately.
The Estate is bringing those strands back together—not to settle the story, but to make the work visible enough to be considered on its own terms.
“I was a painter prior to my vision loss, and have had to reinvent my process of working since.”
HER PORTFOLIO
The 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.
GO DEEPER
The Woman Behind the Art
Nude on stage in Hollywood. Tampon dresses. Seventeen magazine feature. A The Ron Reagan Show (Fox) debate on censorship and the arts. Her art was so provocative it split critics in half. She took the things the world wanted buried and obeyed — hate, shame, female bodies, sex, religion, policies — and made art. She was blind through all of it. Almost no one knew.
 |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |
