HER LIFE + WORK
Believing is seeing.
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.
"I am now less inspired by what I see and more by what I hear, remember and imagine."
—Barbara Romain, artist's statement
A Life Among Artists · What Does a Painting Need to Look Like? · Words, Sound and Visual Music · The Natural Brilliance of Outsiders · Beyond Los Angeles
Barbara Jo Peditto-Romain
1948–2024
Painter · Performer · Educator · Philadelphia-born, Los Angeles-based
Barbara exhibiting "A MERMAN I TURN 2B". Her painting "CHICKEN LITTLE" is seen offscreen to the right.
A Life Built Around Making
Barbara Romain knew she was an artist long before she knew what shape an artist’s life might take.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, the daughter of an architect who sometimes brought her into his architecture-school studio. She studied art from childhood. A four-year scholarship took her to the Philadelphia College of Art, where she later remembered beginning to “identify as an artist.”
She studied painting in the 1960s and emerged from art school with, in her own recollection, “absolutely no idea about making a living.” She traveled abroad, hitchhiked, lived on very little money, returned to America, and moved to Los Angeles in 1972. There were small freelance jobs, secretarial work, selling encyclopedias door to door, marriage, motherhood and divorce. Her life did not arrange itself into a neat professional trajectory.
She kept making art
“I was always painting.”
Barbara Romain, In My Front Yard, 2017.
Acrylic on canvas, 36 × 24 in.
Los Angeles: A Life Among Artists
By her mid-thirties, Barbara was living on her own, raising her son and still painting. During this period she met the writer C. Natale “Chris” Peditto, who would become her husband.
Barbara later described Chris as “a big influence in my identifying myself strongly as an artist”—someone who influenced her to surround herself more completely with an artistic environment and make it a central focus of her life. Through Chris she found her way to the Los Angeles Theatre Center, then an ambitious downtown institution producing fourteen new plays a year. Barbara worked in its Education Department. “That kind of opened some doors,” she remembered.
Chris had come to Los Angeles in pursuit of what he called “the performative aspects of the poetic.” Out of that pursuit grew Gray Pony, first as a choral poetry ensemble and then as poets’ theater. Chris and Barbara founded, ran and performed with Gray Pony, creating work in a world where poetry, theater, music, autobiography and visual art moved freely into one another. They married in the summer of 1995. Chris’s own account traces Gray Pony from poetry performance into increasingly theatrical works including Festival Dionysus.
For Barbara, this artistic environment arrived at precisely the moment when painting had become physically uncertain.
In 1984, after years of painting in oils in a realistic, figurative style, Barbara was diagnosed with a retinal degenerative disease. As her vision deteriorated and she became legally blind, she seriously questioned whether she could continue painting.
“At the same time,” she later wrote, “I began to be interested in writing and performance.” Working with the poets’ theater offered, in her words, “a wonderful outlet for creativity that did not heavily depend on eyesight, as did my painting.”
The canvas was no longer the only place where she could be an artist.
Barbara Romain and Shelley Sachs rehearsing with Grey Pony, 1991.
Archival studio photograph, Estate of Barbara Romain.
Performance became a serious parallel practice. Barbara wrote and performed work across Los Angeles, using the body, autobiography, language, humor, and collaboration as materials alongside painting.
One of those collaborations, aka Ginger Sverlo (1991), became a particularly charged experiment in female experience, language, and cultural taboo. The Estate is preserving the surviving performance material as part of Barbara’s broader interdisciplinary record.
This decade of performance did not sit apart from Barbara’s painting.
It changed it.
What Does a Painting Need to Look Like?
At nearly forty, Barbara returned to graduate school.
She had watched Chris complete graduate school in his forties and was inspired to do the same. She entered the graduate program at Otis College of Art carrying a problem with her: she had learned to paint by looking closely, and looking closely could no longer be trusted. Her graduate work became part of a larger reconsideration of how she could continue painting when the visual precision on which her training had depended was no longer reliable.
“I slowly transformed my thinking and techniques to incorporate my physical limitations as an integral part of my work,” she later wrote.
The question she began asking was fundamental: “What does a painting need to look like?”
Her answer unfolded over decades.
Barbara Romain, Stuart’s Pool, 1982.
Oil on canvas, 28 × 20 in.
As precise vision became less reliable, her palette grew more vivid. She created original stencils to make forms, symbols and icons she could no longer draw freehand. Her paintings moved away from the realistic figuration of her earlier work and increasingly incorporated abstraction, language, improvisation and sound.
The body itself became a tool.
“Physical movements of my body must replace the precision of my eyes as the vehicle for placing marks,” Barbara wrote. She traced the improvisational quality of the paintings directly to collaborations with “experimental theater artists, jazz musicians, and poets.”
The decade spent making work with her body and voice had returned to the canvas.
Words, Sound and Visual Music
Barbara had always been an avid reader. She was surrounded by writers: Chris was a poet, scholar and publisher; her brother Elliott Levin was a Philadelphia-based poet and jazz musician. Theater had put spoken language in her mouth. Music had been present throughout her life.
Increasingly, all of it entered the paintings.
Barbara drew texts from songs, news headlines, junk mail, fortune cookies and literature, alongside alphabet poems, haiku, reflections on personal experience and streams of consciousness. She layered words with landscape, graffiti, pop imagery, pictographs, symbols and fields of acrylic color.
Words did not merely explain the paintings. They became marks.
“I use language as a gestural element—to create patterns, weavings, and layers of information.”
The viewer was not expected to read a Barbara Romain painting from beginning to end.
“The viewer is invited to traverse the canvas and create his/her own poetry.”
Music became one of the most important organizing forces in her mature work.
Barbara listened to jazz, blues, rock and experimental music. She drew to music. Particular compositions could become the originating structure for an entire painting. Her 2005 solo exhibition Bad Eye on the Good Foot brought together paintings built from sound. The title painting was “created as a performance of gestures in the process of listening to the music of James Brown.”
Barbara called these works “visual music.”
Barbara Romain at work on Fire: Burn and The 5 Hindrances in her Hollywood studio.
Archival studio photograph, Estate of Barbara Romain.
Paintings including Children of the Revolution, Soul-Etude and Born Under a Bad Sign transformed music into visual imagery. The later Incantations series deepened the exchange between sound and image, including work inspired by compositions by Elliott Levin.
Barbara’s description of the process remained physical:
“The thrill of color upon color which I can see in varying degrees, drives layer upon layer.”
Language Beyond Sight
Her experiments with language eventually extended beyond what could be seen.
By 2001, Barbara wrote that she had “begun exploring the use of Braille texts as a language element in my work. This exploration eventually evolved into a commission for a mural in Chicago called Into the Light a decade later.
Braille was not an afterthought added to a disability-themed project. It belonged to a much longer investigation of what language could be inside an artwork: readable, visible, tactile, fragmented, repeated, layered.
That investigation reached public scale in 2013 with Into the Light, created for the Blind Service Association in Chicago. Barbara painted four panels around the themes of Information, Community, Independence, and Joy, weaving in texts supplied by the agency’s blind clients. Braille versions of those texts were installed beside the canvases so the people whose words she had incorporated could read them with their hands.
Barbara Romain, Into the Light, 2013.
Acrylic on canvas, 48x 96, Four-panels
The same years in which Barbara was reinventing her own methods of making art also changed how she taught it.
In 1992, Barbara and writer and educator Mira-Lani Bernard co-founded Art Options, an interdisciplinary arts-based education program in Los Angeles. The program was created for young people whom conventional educational systems had often already defined by their problems: students who had dropped out or been expelled or suspended, gang-involved youth, teenage mothers, and students described as troublemakers or struggling emotionally.
Barbara and Mira-Lani began from a different proposition: belief in the “natural brilliance of outsiders” and in the possibility of turning something negative into “a source of pride.”
Over time, Art Options reached more than 1,500 young people across Los Angeles through painting, writing, performance, exhibitions, murals and collaborative projects.
“No one is invisible. Much of my inspiration has been derived over the years from my students.”
Barbara also taught at Columbia College Hollywood for thirty-two years, from 1992 through 2024, teaching subjects including art history, photography and color theory. That same year she co-founded Art Options, a teaching program that went on to hold the California Arts Council's Artist in Residence award for three years.
In 2006–07, Barbara was selected as one of six inaugural Teaching Artist Fellows nationwide through VSA Arts, an affiliate of the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Columbia College Hollywood named her Outstanding Teacher of the Year in 2007.
Teaching and making continually informed one another. Barbara’s classrooms carried the same interest in improvisation, structure, language, music, collaboration and creative authority that shaped the studio.
Teaching was not something Barbara did beside her art.
It was one of the places her ideas became public.
.
Barbara Romain at the VSA Teaching Artist Fellowship, Washington, D.C., 2007.
Archival studio photograph, Estate of Barbara Romain.
Teaching: The Natural Brilliance of Outsiders
For the Community, With the Community
For Barbara, access to art was not only a question of who was allowed to see it. Again and again, her work asked who was allowed to make it.
“My work in Los Angeles,” she wrote, “has often involved projects created for the community and with community participation.”
That distinction mattered. Barbara did not simply transfer an individual studio practice into public settings. She repeatedly constructed projects in which neighborhood residents, schoolchildren, teenagers, audiences and community participants entered the process of making itself.
Barbara carried that participatory instinct into the city.
Las Angelinas, created for the former Woman’s Building in downtown Los Angeles, grew from Barbara’s winning entry in the “Gilding the Building” competition and became a participatory mural project. The project was supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.
Across Los Angeles and beyond, public projects brought the same participatory ideas into murals, installations, schools, neighborhood sites and galleries. Works including Las Angelinas, Whose Myth Are Youse With?, Echo Love, Signs of Life and What’s in a Name? shifted audiences from spectators toward participants.
The deeper histories of these projects are documented in the Estate’s Public Art archive.
Barbara Romain, Las Angelinas Mural, 1990.
50 × 15 ft, former Woman’s Building, downtown Los Angeles. Winner of the “Gilding the Building” competition
BEYOND LOS ANGELES
The practice was deeply rooted in Los Angeles. Its audience was not.
Over the following decades, Barbara’s work traveled through juried exhibitions, museums, universities, nonprofit art spaces and international programs. San Francisco became a recurring point in that history through exhibitions connected with the de Young Museum, while Chicago became the site of one of her longest sustained exhibition relationships.
Two paintings, Dialogue: Peace and Dialogue: Star, entered Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate in 2008. Curated by Katie Knight, the traveling exhibition has carried Barbara’s work through thirty-two showings across thirty-one venues over eighteen years and continues in 2026.
In 2013, Barbara was the sole United States artist in ART BLIND in Cologne, Germany, an international exhibition of sixteen artists from nine countries. Her life and working process were also documented in the film Can You See Me?
AWARDS AND RECOGNITION
Juries returned to her work for three decades. In 1998 she took First Prize in the National Juried Exhibit of Artists Beyond Disability at California State University, Long Beach. In 2003, Confronting Orange won First Prize in the Walter Knott Annual Art Award. In 2006 Royal Flush took Third Place in Satsuma Gallery's national juried competition, and the prize was a two-artist exhibition of her own the following year. In 2012, Geometry won the Judi Jasek Award for Outstanding Artist at Passionate Focus in Chicago. In 2015, she was the featured artist at the UCLA National Arts and Disability Center.
The full exhibition, award, and collection record is maintained in the Estate archive and curriculum vitae.
Barbara's DIALOGUE: STAR
Fort Collins Museum of Art façade
Installation featuring Dialogue: Peace
Barbara’s life and work resist being compressed into a single story.
She was a painter, but never only a painter. Vision loss transformed her practice, but it did not define it.
Performance, poetry, music, ceramics, teaching, public art and collaboration were not detours from some more essential body of work. They became part of the same expanding practice.
Painting, performance, poetry, music, teaching, ceramics and public work continually fed one another. Language became visual material. Music became structure. The body became a tool. Teaching became exchange. Public projects opened the act of making to people who might otherwise have remained spectators.
Yet painting remained the place where much of Barbara’s expansive practice converged: bodily gesture, color, words, sound, symbols, memory and urban life.
Barbara kept testing the limits of what a painting—and an artist—could contain. She described herself as “continually exploring the boundaries of taste and perception,” returning again and again to a deceptively simple question: “What does a painting need to look like?”
The answer was never fixed.
Her paintings moved through sex, religion, politics, mythology, memory, popular culture, female experience, city life, grief, humor, music and language. Serious subjects did not require solemnity. Speaking about the work she selected for REMEMBER, Barbara wrote:
“My work, even when confronting sad or serious themes I hope reflects a sense of life and joy in the face of sorrow.”
Nor did she turn her blindness into a mythology about herself. Her own language was more matter-of-fact:
“I was a painter prior to my vision loss, and have had to reinvent my process of working since.”
Reinvention did not mean leaving one identity behind and replacing it with another. It meant refusing the limits of any single one.
Asked in an interview what being an artist had ultimately come to mean to her, Barbara first spoke about the almost addictive force of creativity—the moment when the “creative juice” begins to flow.
Then she answered more simply: “I feel like it is my life’s work.”
Barbara Romain, describing When the Music Is Over
Documentary filming of Can You See Me? Directed by Linda “L.D.
Barbara Romain died in 2024, leaving behind paintings, works on paper, collages, ceramics, writings, performances, photographs, recordings, public projects, teaching materials and an extensive personal archive.
The Estate of Barbara Romain is now preserving, cataloguing and reconstructing that record—reuniting works with their histories, recovering exhibitions and collaborations, preserving Barbara’s own words, and bringing the work forward for audiences who did not encounter it during her lifetime.
The archive continues to reveal her.
So does the work.
And Barbara left something like instructions for anyone standing before one of her paintings: traverse the canvas, make the connections, and create your own poetry.
Barbara Romain, 2019.
Portrait from A BOOK OF magazine’s editorial feature “Visual Artist: Barbara Romain,” April 19, 2019.
A Life That Refused Reduction
DISCOVER MORE
Barbara in her own words.
Selected artist statements, interviews, and writings spanning her practice.
CAN YOU SEE ME?
The documentary on Barbara Romain’s life and working process.
