Barbara Romain
(1948 – 2024)
Barbara Romain was never only a painter.
She was a professor, performer, public artist, poet, collagist, ceramicist, songwriter, muralist, illustrator, publisher, provocateur, and builder of creative communities. Her work moved through museums, galleries, theaters, classrooms, publications, public space, film, television, and the cultural underground of Los Angeles. She possessed the training and technical discipline to pursue a conventional art career. Instead, she spent a lifetime testing how much more an artist—and a work of art—might contain.
Awarded a four-year art scholarship by the Philadelphia Board of Education, Barbara studied painting at the Philadelphia College of Art before moving west and earning an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Her education was rigorous. She understood drawing, composition, color, art history, and the cultivated authority of the painter’s hand.
She later called her paintings visual music.
Barbara's self-portrait, IN MY FRONT YARD
The world gave her visual music a larger stage.
For nearly five decades, Barbara lived inside the city’s creative underground, where painters, poets, actors, musicians, activists, teachers, and beautiful eccentrics crossed freely through one another’s lives. Her husband, Chris Peditto, was a poetry scholar, writer, editor, and independent publisher associated with Heat Press. Together, Barbara and Chris founded Gray Pony, an experimental performance collective that gathered poets, actors, musicians, artists, and friends into work that crossed theater, autobiography, jazz, satire, ritual, and cultural confrontation.
Barbara’s home became part of the practice: studio, salon, rehearsal room, classroom, refuge, and argument.
Nothing remained neatly separated for long.
Her paintings drew from graffiti, newspaper headlines, devotional imagery, junk mail, commercial printing, popular music, political language, comic books, prayer cards, pinups, freeway signs, ancient symbols, and the visual debris of American life. Saints appeared beside advertising. Grief collided with jokes. Sacred symbols occupied the same surface as sexual bodies, cheap print, street language, and bad taste.
Barbara once titled a painting Ugly Beautiful.
It was more than a title. It described her way of seeing.
She understood beauty not as refinement or purity, but as something inseparable from disorder, appetite, damage, vulgarity, sorrow, humor, and survival. Her paintings did not resolve contradiction. They gave it room.
Long before interdisciplinary practice became institutional language, Barbara refused to remain inside a single discipline. She made paintings, performances, collages, ceramics, poems, murals, songs, comics, and children’s books. She worked in public art and education. Her images appeared in publications and productions. Her work entered museums and galleries, but also theaters, magazines, films, television, classrooms, and civic space.
The paintings were never the whole story.
Barbara exhibiting "A MERMAN I TURN 2B". Her painting "CHICKEN LITTLE" is seen offscreen to the right.
In 1991, Barbara Romain stood naked onstage with one of the most inflammatory titles in American theater attached to her body, "Nigger Lovers", and then refused to apologize when critics attacked her intelligence, body, politics, and womanhood. The full-length experimental production, written and performed by Barbara and Shelley Sachs, was presented by Gray Pony and directed by Mira-Lani Oglesby at the Igloo Theatre in Hollywood.
Conceived in the tradition of Lenny Bruce, it opened in August, ran late nights on Fridays and Saturdays, and was extended from its original four-week engagement through October. The work later continued as "More Nigger Lovers", appeared in Women’s History Month programming, prompted a national television discussion on The Reagan Show about censorship and the arts, and became the basis of a writing workshop with incarcerated women.
The title was deliberately combustible. Its immediate source was John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s song “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” but Barbara’s argument was more complex than citation or shock. In her artist statement, mordantly titled, "If You Change the Title You Could Probably Get a Grant", she described the work as a reclamation of language and a refusal of the social categories that keep people and ideas safely separated. She argued that suppressing words can preserve their violence and that artists must be free to take language loaded with shame or hatred and force it into a different relation.
The poster showed Barbara and Shelley naked from behind, the two words of the title painted across their bodies. They did not present themselves as idealized nudes. Their middle-aged bodies were part of the argument. When asked why they would show themselves in an “unflattering” way, they answered that they were proud of themselves, proud of their bodies, and proud to be middle-aged women.
Onstage, they used autobiographical stories, nudity, video, poetry, music, satire, cross-dressing, pop songs, ritual, and costumes made from tampons. The soundtrack moved through Lenny Bruce, Patti Smith, James Brown, Miles Davis, the Velvet Underground, Nancy Sinatra, Sly and the Family Stone, children’s records, easy listening, Jewish music, film scores, and found spoken word. The point was not eclecticism for its own sake. Barbara and her collaborators used the seductive language of popular culture to expose the misogyny, racial tension, longing, fantasy, and humiliation buried inside it.
The stories were not cleaned up for feminist respectability.
Barbara and Shelley spoke about drugs, bad men, sex, pleasure, exploitation, appetite, violence, poor judgment, friendship, shame, and survival. They did not ask to be admired before asking to be heard. Barbara rejected the expectation that women must narrate dangerous or sexual histories only as victims, while men are permitted to transform the same experiences into adventure, mythology, or art.
That refusal is foundational to understanding her.
Barbara’s fearlessness was not the absence of risk. It was her willingness to make the work despite knowing exactly what the culture might do to her.
The reviews divided sharply. Some critics called the production politically pungent, unapologetically raunchy, loving, celebratory, and gut-level powerful. Others dismissed it as amateurish, unintelligible, self-pitying, or nearly everything avant-garde theater should not be. Barbara and Shelley were criticized not only for the work’s content, but for their bodies, intelligence, training, anger, and refusal to apologize.
Barbara extended the run.
That response tells us more about her than the word “fearless” ever could.
She was not interested in provocation detached from consequence. The work moved beyond the theater into public argument, national media, women’s arts programming, and a prison workshop. Barbara took a production that had made people furious and brought it somewhere it could become useful.
Nor did she leave painting when she entered the theater.
The archive contains her illustrated broadside I’m a Nigger Lover, a dense hand-lettered field of song fragments, drawings, jokes, popular lyrics, and overlapping visual noise. It belongs to the same artistic logic as her later text paintings: music becoming typography, autobiography becoming collage, language becoming image, cultural debris becoming composition.
Barbara did not abandon the canvas for the stage.
She made the painting large enough to contain bodies, voices, music, memory, embarrassment, and an audience that might hate her for it.
She Refused to Make Women Admirable First
Poster and program cover of Barbara Romain and Shelley Sachs' for their 1991 performance of "Nigger Lovers" at the Igloo Theater, Hollywood, CA
Barbara Romain, portrait in her dining room, circa 2019
Newspaper clippings from 1991 highlighting scenes from Grey Pony's provacative experimental feminist play.
Painting After Sight
Barbara receiving a vision test for the documentary "CAN YOU SEE ME?"
Diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa in 1984, Barbara faced a degenerative retinal condition that progressively transformed her vision. By the time of her mature Los Angeles career, she was legally blind.
Braille labels helped her identify paint colors. Magnification technology enlarged what remained visible. Hand-cut stencils allowed forms to be repeated, shifted, layered, and reconstructed. Memory, sound, touch, chance, and imagination assumed increasingly significant roles in the process.
But blindness did not create Barbara’s interest in repetition, found language, stencils, anti-virtuosic form, or visual disruption. It changed the material conditions under which an already formidable artist worked. That distinction matters.
Barbara resisted the sentimental story of the disabled artist whose loss somehow produced spiritual compensation. Blindness shaped her process, politics, and daily life, but it did not explain her imagination.
Barbara resisted the sentimental story of the disabled artist whose loss somehow produced spiritual compensation. Blindness shaped her process, politics, and daily life, but it did not explain her imagination.
She did not become inspirational when she lost her sight.
She remained Barbara.
As her vision changed, unexpected color relationships entered the paintings. Partial perception became compositional possibility. Mistakes were not always corrected. Chance acquired greater authority.
Sometimes the error knew more than the plan.
Her life and process became the subject of the 2013 documentary Can You See Me? That same year, she was selected as the sole artist from the United States for ART BLIND in Cologne, an international exhibition of sixteen artists from nine countries. She also delivered a symposium presentation titled Believing Is Seeing and led a workshop at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln.
In 2015, the National Arts and Disability Center at UCLA awarded her its Arts and Accessibility Technical Assistance Grant, funding new work and the redesign of her website, and named her a Featured Artist that spring; she remains a listed artist in the NADC’s national registry, where six of her paintings — Color Haikus, Fire Burn, Garden of Eden, Hard Rain, In My Front Yard, and Whispers — represent her practice.
Yet she refused to be reduced to “the blind artist.” Disability informed the work without containing it.
Art as Counter-Argument
Barbara's DIALOGUE: STAR
Barbara’s political work was rarely illustrative. She preferred transformation.
In Dialogue: Star, she worked directly with racist and antisemitic books, collaging and painting over their pages while allowing the original language to remain visible beneath her intervention. The Star of David did not erase the source material. It confronted it.
Barbara converted hostile text into contested space. She did not pretend the language of hate had disappeared. She refused to let it retain the last word.
This instinct links Dialogue: Star to her performative work in the 1990's and, more broadly, to her work. Again and again, Barbara entered contaminated language rather than avoiding it. She treated words, symbols,
stereotypes, popular songs, devotional images, advertising, and cultural debris as material charged by history. Her task was not to purify them. It was to rearrange their power.
Her Jewishness, feminism, disability politics, sexuality, humor, and distrust of institutional authority were never separate departments. They occupied the same surface.
Barbara's DIALOGUE: PEACE at the SEAKING VOLUMES/TRANSFORMING HATE Exhibition, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY NYC, Feb 24 to Apr 8, 2016. She is holding a copy of the scarce 1979 first-edition exhibition catalogue/brochure for Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party featuring early imagery of her famous vulvar porcelain test plates.
The Classroom Was Part of the Work
Barbara believed art belonged to people before it belonged to institutions.
For more than three decades, she was a professor at Columbia College Hollywood’s School of Film & Television in Tarzana, California. She co-founded Art Options, an interdisciplinary program for teenagers whom conventional educational systems had often underestimated, marginalized, or abandoned. Painting, poetry, theater, music, mythology, movement, and public performance were not treated as enrichment around a “real” education. They were serious forms of thought, agency, and self-determination.
Barbara at her TEACHING ARTIST FELLOWSHIP, VSA Arts, affiliate of the John F. Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C., in 2007
Barbara took young people seriously before asking them to prove themselves respectable.
She received artist residencies through the California Arts Council and the City of Los Angeles and a national Teaching Artist Fellowship through VSA Arts and the Kennedy Center. Her teaching and public art were not charitable additions to the studio practice. They emerged from the same conviction: that people should be able to make images, language, performance, and culture from experiences the world had taught them to conceal.
Her students remembered her because she recognized intelligence where institutions had failed to see it.
A Life That Refused Reduction
Barbara exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. Her work moved through museums, galleries, institutional collections, public projects, publications, theatrical productions, film, and television. She was formally trained, professionally accomplished, and internationally recognized.
But credentials alone cannot explain her.
She was glamorous and abrasive. Spiritual and profane. Tender and combative. Scholarly and irreverent. Political without becoming doctrinaire. Funny without becoming harmless. She could teach with enormous generosity and provoke with equal conviction.
She understood the traditions she was breaking. Then she broke them on purpose.
Barbara made art from saints, rockers, jazz, grief, sex, scripture, graffiti, headlines, junk mail, prayer, disability, memory, rage, pleasure, and the beautiful ugliness of American life.
She did not require women to become admirable before giving them a voice.
She did not require ugliness to become beautiful before giving it a place in art.
She did not require difficult language to become harmless before confronting it.
And she did not require young people to become compliant before taking them seriously.
Barbara in process painting "FIRE, BURN" and "THE 5 HINDERENCES in her Hollywood, CA studio
Barbara Romain died in 2024, leaving behind paintings, drawings, collages, ceramics, poems, songs, scripts, films, photographs, teaching materials, public works, performances, and an archive still being reconstructed. Yet the objects tell only part of the story. She is survived by her son, Justin Romain — now steward of her estate — three grandchildren.
Barbara belonged to a generation for whom art was inseparable from conversation, friendship, dissent, education, pleasure, performance, argument, and the making of a life.
The work was never made to behave, and neither was she.
She did not make art to fit the world. She made a world out of everything society had no room for.
SEVENTEEN MAGAZINE's "Rock On", Prom Issue, 2009, featuring Barbara's "HOT FLASH" and "THOMAS GUIDE" artworks.
Barbara filming the documentary, "CAN YOU SEE ME" explaining her artwork, "WHEN THE MUSIC'S OVER".
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Barbara in Her Own Words
