Access Intimacy at The Barnes Foundation

This paper focuses on The Barnes Foundation, its original deteriorating building, and the role that disability played in narratives regarding modifications to that building. I’ll consider how one of the galleries at the original Merion location was destroyed to build an elevator. The removal of this gallery to make room for an elevator was linked to legal requirements to comply with the A.D.A. Yet it was not a legal requirement but a voluntary choice made by the museum’s board in the mid-1990s. The subsequent construction of this narrative positions the A.D.A. as a damaging force and disability as a threat to the very structure of the institution. I argue against the presumption that A.D.A. compliance is destructive to art institutions and instead lay out new protocols that centers structural changes as modes of radical care for the physical building, the art it houses, and the bodies that occupy it. This radical care aligns with what Mia Mingus calls access intimacy, or the profound recognition between people (and institutions and art objects) that access is not a side project but pivotal to the very existence of a building, a work of art, and disabled people. What would happen if instead of positioning disability accommodation within the museum as inherently destructive, accessibility was approached from a place of deep and radical care that embraced the material precarity of the structure of the institution, the art objects within them, and the diverse embodiment of those that move in and out of these spaces?