Sign
Acrylic on canvas, 15 × 30 inches, 2005
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ESTATE EDITIONS
GALLERY-WRAPPED CANVAS
MUSEUM FRAMED
GALLERY-MOUNTED ACRYLIC
ABOUT THIS WORK
She bought a street atlas of Los Angeles, tore it apart, and pasted the city back together wrong.
Two of the sheets in Sign are upside down. The printed page numbers of the atlas show through the paint. Over the top of that reassembled grid she wrote the city's other handwriting — DON, KOS, KEN, a hand-painted 92 — the tags that were already on every wall she walked past. A map is the city's official account of itself. Graffiti is the unofficial one. She stacked them.
By 2005 she had been losing her sight for twenty years and had turned that toward language. “My sight was going, I was depending more on my hearing … language, you know, people talking, is something I can totally pick up on.” She collected her texts from “songs, news headlines, junk mail, fortune cookies and works of literature.” For this one she took them off a wall.
Acrylic on canvas, 2005. Shown in Destruction of the State: Writing on the Wall, Satsuma Gallery, North Hollywood, 2007; Shared Visions, Marshall B. Ketchum University, Fullerton, 2012; and Sensations, Long Beach City College, 2017.
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Barbara Romain (1948–2024)
Barbara Romain was an American painter, writer, performer, and creative provocateur whose work explored the intersection of music, memory, language, and perception. Based in Los Angeles and trained in Philadelphia, she developed a distinctive artistic practice she called "visual music," creating paintings that translated rhythm, emotion, and lived experience into vibrant fields of color, gesture, and text.
In 1984, Romain was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a progressive degenerative eye disease that would eventually leave her legally blind. Rather than abandoning her artistic practice, she transformed the challenge into a new way of seeing. For the next four decades, she created paintings from what she could hear, remember, imagine, and feel, building a body of work that stands as one of the most compelling explorations of creativity beyond conventional vision.
Romain's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the de Young Museum, the Holter Museum of Art, the John F. Kennedy Center, and the ART BLIND exhibition in Cologne, Germany, among others. Her life and artistic process were featured in the award-winning 2013 documentary Can You See Me?, which brought international attention to her pioneering approach to painting.
