Visitors to the galleries of the Barnes Foundation are often so engrossed in the complicated arrangement of the masterpieces on the walls, they fail to look at the floor.
The parquet flooring is inlaid with dark lines around sculpture and furniture, lines visitors are not allowed to cross. Gallery guards spend much of their time pointing out the lines to people whose eyes are busy looking up.
In her reaction to the Barnes collection, artist Judy Pfaff used every surface of the special rotating art gallery on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia – the walls, ceiling, and floors – to create a psychedelic garden of manipulated photography, foam resin, and metalwork. The floor pieces are bounded by zigzagging metal rails at varying heights. They are impossible to overlook.
