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EXHIBITION HISTORY
Madonna of the Freeway
Oil on canvas · 20x16 in
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.
IN POSSESSION OF
Estate of Barbara Romain.
