Madonna of the Freeway

Oil on canvas, 16 × 20 inches

Edition of 25, archival pigment on museum cotton rag · embossed, hand-numbered, estate-initialed · native size · signed COA.

ABOUT THIS WORK

She's wearing red heels.

The Madonna of Barbara Romain's Los Angeles walks a hot pink freeway in a blue robe and a gold halo, carrying a haloed child, past palm trees and an off-ramp, under crossed searchlights. Smaller haloed figures crouch at the edges. Nothing about the handling is reverent, and all of it is devotional.

There is a painting underneath this painting — an earlier Madonna and Child — and she came back later to add details, including helicopters. That is the whole artist in one object: a woman who kept editing the world she had already put down.

She was direct about the appetite behind work like this. "I am continually exploring the boundaries of taste and perception," she wrote, "asking what does a painting need to look like?"

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.