“Barbara never made art to fit the world. She built a world out of everything society had no room for.”
Barbara Romain
Barbara Romain (married name Barbara Romain Peditto) was a Philadelphia-trained painter, professor, performer, and public artist who spent nearly five decades inside the creative underground of Los Angeles. Her work moved from museums and European exhibitions to experimental theaters, city walls, classrooms, films, magazines, and television—but she never settled into one polite medium or one acceptable version of an artist’s life.
She painted saints and pinups, graffiti and prayers, jazz and junk mail, sex and mourning. She transformed racist and antisemitic books into Jewish counter-text, built arts programs for young people institutions had abandoned, and once placed her own unidealized, middle-aged naked body at the center of a feminist performance about sex, addiction, misogyny, pleasure, humiliation, and female survival.
The critics praised her, mocked her, and tried to shame her.
Barbara extended the run.
Formally accomplished, intellectually fearless, glamorous, funny, spiritual, abrasive, and impossible to domesticate, she understood that art did not become serious by becoming polite.
