Sign

Sign

Acrylic collage on canvas, 15 × 30 inches

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

ABOUT THIS WORK

The ground is a street map of Central Los Angeles. The atlas legend is still legible in the corner. Everything on top of it is a tag.

Sign is Barbara Romain painting the city's handwriting onto the city's own diagram — DON, KOS, KEN, a 92 repeated twice — in white, black and blood red over the printed grid of streets. Language doing the work of image again: "I use language as a gestural element, to create patterns, weavings, and layers of information."

She kept a running inventory of where her texts came from: "songs, news headlines, junk mail, fortune cookies and works of literature," plus her own "alphabet poems, haikus, reflections of personal experience and streams of consciousness." Here she took them off a wall.

She was clear about why language kept taking over. "My sight was going, I was depending more on my hearing … language, you know, people talking, is something I can totally pick up on."

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.