“Barbara never made art to fit the world. She built a world out of everything society had no room for.”
THE ARTIST
Barbara Romain was a Philadelphia-trained painter, professor, performer, and public artist who spent nearly five decades inside the creative underground of Los Angeles. Her work moved from museums and European exhibitions to experimental theaters, city walls, classrooms, films, magazines, and television—but she never settled into one polite medium or one acceptable version of an artist’s life.
She painted saints and pinups, graffiti and prayers, jazz and junk mail, sex and mourning. She transformed racist and antisemitic books into Jewish counter-text, built arts programs for young people institutions had abandoned, and once placed her own unidealized, middle-aged naked body at the center of a feminist performance about sex, addiction, misogyny, pleasure, humiliation, and female survival.
The critics praised her, mocked her, and tried to shame her.
Barbara extended the run.
Formally accomplished, intellectually fearless, glamorous, funny, spiritual, abrasive, and impossible to domesticate, she understood that art did not become serious by becoming polite.
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THE PRINTS & EDITIONS
Collect Her Work
Barbara left behind roughly 400 paintings and mixed-media pieces, and over 100 ceramic vessels. Her originals remain with the Estate for the foreseeable future; until then, fine art prints and Estate Editions are the means by which the work enters collections.
Prints from $215 · Edition $2,500
ESTATE EDITIONS OF 100
Prints from $125 · Edition $2,500
ESTATE EDITIONS OF 100
THE ESTATE OPENS
First Releases
Each painting is issued once, as an Estate Edition of 100 archival prints at the work’s original size — handstamped, numbered, and signed by the Estate with a Certificate of Authenticity. Open-edition prints from $125.
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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.
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