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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THE ESTATE OPENS
Collect her work.
Barbara left more than 500 works: over 400 paintings and mixed-media pieces, and more than 100 ceramic vessels. The originals remain with the Estate for preservation, research and exhibition.
A very limited selection of her most iconic, exhibited work is available two ways: numbered Estate Editions, and open-edition fine art prints in the Print Shop.
BELIEVING IS SEEING
An artist in collision.
Barbara Romain was a painter who lost most of her sight in mid-career and kept working for another thirty years — not in spite of it, but through it.
Barbara Romain, photographed with Spirits of Romaine Street Gather for a Backyard BBQ.
Acrylic collage on canvas, 72 × 48 in.,
ARTWORK ON VIEW