Seeing the Barnes
Branding, advertising, digital, out of home, community engagementIn a Renoir, a woman lounges, arm draped, head tilted back in the particular ease of someone who has forgotten she is being watched. A few blocks away, a Philadelphian does the same thing on her front steps. You've seen this before, you just didn't know it. This was the animating logic of "You'll Never Stop Seeing the Barnes," a full-scale institutional marketing campaign launched in partnership with Karma Agency in 2018, built on a simple and generous idea: that the Barnes Foundation Museum's collection of post-Impressionist and early modern masterworks isn't remote or rarefied, it's everywhere, hiding in plain sight across the city that contains it.
The campaign's central conceit, superimposing portraits from the collection over images of contemporary Philadelphians, raised a question that required reckoning with directly: a collection of paintings featuring predominantly white subjects, painted predominantly by white men, could not simply be mapped onto the faces of a diverse city without that choice being made intentionally and collaboratively. Rather than use stock photography, the campaign was reimagined as a community co-creation. Barnes Foundation staff members, community partners, artists, educators, and collaborators whose work intersects with the institution, were invited to choose the works they wanted to be paired with and to tell their own stories in their own words. The result transformed the campaign from a potentially fraught premise into a platform for genuine dialogue around race, representation, and who belongs in museum spaces. Working in close collaboration with Karma Agency's creative direction, I executed the art direction and graphic design across a full media mix: outdoor, print, television, radio, and digital channels including social, email, and a dedicated landing page. The campaign was recognized with multiple ADDY Awards for out-of-home advertising.
+ Type: Calibre by Klim Type Foundry
+ Creative Direction: Karma Agency
+ Art Direction & Graphic Design: Olivia Verdugo
+ Portrait Photography: Michael Perez
© 2026 Olivia S Verdugo