The potato barn is the secluded, century-old workspace where Rabo Karabekian keeps his most consequential artistic history out of sight. First a place of private work and retreat, it becomes a locked chamber for the remnants of his disgraced painting, then the setting for a six-month return to painting, and finally a public passage through the vast work he has kept hidden. Its changing function gives the barn a role beyond backdrop: it holds Rabo’s past in material form and controls when, and how, that past can be seen.

Studio and private refuge

Rabo has lived and painted in the potato barn, and its privacy is part of its meaning. Years after he stops making pictures, he still describes his best work as something locked up in the place, where he has saved it for last. The barn’s secrecy is therefore not just a matter of keeping a door closed: it becomes a way to hold back a work, and the judgment that would follow its release.

The space is also where Rabo’s identity as a painter is tested in practical terms. He once sets up a stretched, primed canvas eight feet square and prepares to roll on Sateen Dura-Luxe in a shade called “Hungarian Rhapsody.” Paul Slazinger asks whether the picture would still be a Karabekian if someone else applied the same paint with the same roller. Rabo says it would, provided the painter had what Karabekian had in reserve. The exchange places the barn’s humble equipment—canvas, roller, and commercial paint—beside the harder-to-define substance he believes makes the work his own.

The failed painting returned to its panels

The barn’s most important contents are eight stretched canvases, each eight feet by eight feet, standing side by side on two-by-fours like a fence down its middle. Together they make a continuous surface sixty-four feet long. These are the panels that once formed “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen,” Rabo’s best-known work before the paint and tape began to come apart, turning its former fame into notoriety.

The panels had been found behind a locked steel door in the lowest of the three basement levels beneath the Matsumoto Building, formerly the GEFFCo Building. An insurance inspector investigating possible fire hazards recognized them from the shreds of Sateen Dura-Luxe still clinging to their surfaces. Three months before Edith’s death, the panels returned to Rabo’s possession. Their journey from a sealed underground chamber to his barn preserves the painting’s double history: once displayed in a corporate lobby, it had become a hidden, damaged object before Rabo could work on it again.

Rabo has every trace of the paint removed, then has the panels restretched and reprimed. They stand in the barn dazzling white, returned to the condition they were in before he transformed them into “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen.” He tells his wife that the project is an exorcism of an unhappy past and a symbolic repair of harm he did to himself and others during his brief painting career. He also acknowledges the limits of that explanation: words cannot fully account for how or why a painting comes to be. The old, narrow barn and its repeated whiteness belong to the project as much as the canvases do.

Secrecy, withdrawal, and return

After the servants leave, Rabo describes himself as an untamed old raccoon living around the potato barn. For six months he keeps its sliding doors shut so that nobody can see what he is doing inside. When the work is finished, he adds five locks and hasps and snaps them shut. The doors make the studio into an enforced boundary between his private labor and other people’s curiosity.

That secrecy is written into Rabo’s will as well. He directs that the barn remain locked until after his burial, alongside provisions for his sons’ inheritance and his own burial in his Izzy Finkelstein suit. The closure is not presented as a temporary convenience but as a condition governing what may happen to the work after his death. When Circe Berman urges him to show her what he has made, Rabo resists because he does not want to be present when people judge whether it is any good. He eventually agrees to fetch the keys and asks Circe to come with him. The shift from locked doors to invitation begins with his decision to face the response he had tried to postpone.

From hidden studio to public attraction

Rabo first shows Circe the enormous work from its extreme right end. Before the floodlights come on, the sixty-four-foot painting is compressed by foreshortening into what seems to be a triangle only five feet wide, so there is no way to tell from that position what the picture is. The encounter is staged by the barn’s length: the work cannot be grasped all at once from the threshold, and its revelation depends on both illumination and movement. Circe gasps when the lights come on.

The barn later becomes part of the regular tour of Rabo’s museum, following the small girls on swings in the foyer and the early works of the Abstract Expressionists. Rabo unspikes the sliding doors at the far end so the increased stream of visitors can pass through without forming eddies and backwash. They enter at one end and leave at the other; some go through more than once, though not through the entire exhibition, only the potato barn. A space once organized around withholding now accommodates repeated public passage.

No solemn critic has yet appeared, but visitors have asked what kind of painting Rabo would call the work. He answers that it is not a painting but a tourist attraction, a World’s Fair, and Disneyland—then qualifies the comparison as a gruesome Disneyland where nobody is cute. The description refuses a neat separation between fine art and popular spectacle. The barn’s physical scale, the guided route, and the repeat visits have made it a destination as well as a studio, while Rabo retains the right to frame what visitors are seeing.

A space that stores and releases memory

The potato barn gathers several distinct forms of artistic time into one place: Rabo’s earlier work with paint and roller, the collapse and recovery of “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen,” and the new painting that fills its length. The restored white panels are both a literal preparation for a new work and a material reminder of the old one. Rabo’s explanation of the project as exorcism meets the barn’s actual role as a place where the past is not simply discarded but reworked and finally exposed.

Its architectural features shape that exposure. Closed sliding doors, multiple locks, a dark approach, floodlights, and the long line of panels make secrecy and revelation matters of physical space, not merely ideas in Rabo’s account. When the doors are opened for visitors, the barn does not lose its history as a refuge; rather, that history becomes part of what the public enters. The former hiding place is converted into a museum route, and the work that Rabo feared would be judged becomes the attraction through which the route is experienced.