EXHIBITION PRESS DOSSIER · 2003–2022
PASSIONATE FOCUS
Barbara kept returning to Chicago for nearly two decades. The surviving record is unusually dense: annual program books, archived artist pages, installation photographs, sales records, the 2012 Judi Jasek Award and ABC7 Chicago. Rather than collapse that history into one CV line, this dossier lets it accumulate year by year.
Passionate Focus is Second Sense’s annual national juried exhibition of blind and low-vision artists—the Guild for the Blind, earlier the Catholic Guild for the Blind. Barbara showed in 2003 and then every year from 2009 to 2022 but one: fourteen editions, twenty-six works, five sales, one award. The organizer keeps the record; we have simply put it back beside the paintings.
THE AWARD
2012 · Judi Jasek Award · Geometry
The program book prints “Judi Jasek Award Winner” beside her name; the award attaches to Geometry (2009). Her own travel-funds request that spring: “This year I have been awarded the Outstanding Artist of the Year prize.” She flew to Chicago for the opening—the first time she attended the show.
THE FORMAT
One opening, then the show moves
Most years the exhibition opened at a hotel or civic venue—the Fairmont, the Arts Club of Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center—and then hung for a month at the Illinois Eye Institute of the Illinois College of Optometry. Both venues are correct for the same year; the dossier lists both.
HER VOICE
An audio recording survives
Second Sense holds a recording of Barbara describing her approach to the work in the exhibit. It is the only audio of its kind in the archive.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Barbara on Passionate Focus
I had been a painter for several years when I was diagnosed with a retinal degenerative disease and became legally blind. I questioned my ability to continue painting, and slowly transformed my thinking and techniques to incorporate my physical limitations as an integral part of my work.
My color palette has grown stronger as my sight diminishes. I create original stencils which form icons and symbols as imagery I can no longer draw freehand. In many of my large acrylic paintings I use text as a “weaving of words,” creating a complex image where the viewer is invited to create his/her own poetry.
I am now inspired less by what I see and more by what I hear, remember and imagine.
The process for making the work is dynamic, raw, multi-layered, and passionate. I do not usually use “blindness” as a specific subject of the work, but rather it is a function of how I create the paintings. Along with the stencils and color enhancement I use my whole body in a series of spontaneous gestures to replace my eyes as the vehicle for placing marks on the canvas.
“When I was diagnosed with a retinal degenerative disease I had already been trained as a professional fine artist. I had to re-think my whole approach to making art. I am now inspired less by what I see, and more by what I hear, remember, and imagine. My paintings explore the weaving of words and symbols. I utilize texts quoted from a variety of sources such as songs, news headlines, junk mail, fortune cookies, and works of literature, as well as original texts such as alphabet poems, haikus, reflections of personal experience and streams of consciousness. The viewer is invited to create his/her own poetry.”
— Barbara Romain, bio and statement for Passionate Focus 2019, Illinois Eye Institute, Chicago, February 2019
THE PRESS RECORD
What was written, printed and photographed
Every press release below states two facts: whether Barbara is named, and whether her artwork is highlighted.