Madonna of the Freeway
Oil on canvas, 20 × 16 inches
Edition of 25, archival pigment on museum cotton rag · embossed, hand-numbered, estate-initialed · native size · signed COA.
ABOUT THIS WORK
Underneath this painting there is an altarpiece.
The estate holds photographs of the canvas in two states. In the first, a mother and child stand in gold and architecture, exactly where five centuries of European painting put them. In the second, that world is gone and the same two figures are walking a Los Angeles freeway. She did not repaint the Madonna. She repainted everything around her, and left the woman standing.
She was teaching this while she did it. Her own art history syllabus for Columbia College Hollywood sets the Madonna and Child as the model for the Renaissance week — “composition using perspective model of Madonna & child.” Her students were building the form from the inside. She was taking it out of the frame and setting it down on an interchange.
“I am continually exploring the boundaries of taste and perception,” she wrote, “asking what does a painting need to look like?” Here the answer is visible in layers: the old picture still under the new one, and a figure that has survived being moved.
Oil on canvas.
OTHER AVAILABLE FORMATS
GALLERY-MOUNTED ACRYLIC
GALLERY-WRAPPED CANVAS
MUSEUM FRAMED
GIFTS & MERCHANDISE
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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.
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