Museum honors a late artist by covering its floor in enough peanut
butter to make 15,000 sandwiches
[July 10, 2026]
By MOLLY QUELL
ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) — More than 800 pounds of peanut butter —
enough for around 15,000 sandwiches — has been spread across the floor
of a museum in the Netherlands in tribute to Dutch artist Wim T.
Schippers, who died last month.
The conceptual artist, who died at the age of 83, first created the
Pindakaasvloer, or peanut butter floor, in 1969. The work was unveiled
on Thursday at the Depot offshoot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in
the Dutch port city of Rotterdam for a two-month show.
Schippers was a beloved non-conformist character in the Netherlands,
where he also voiced Ernie and Kermit the Frog in the Dutch version of
“Sesame Street,” and created absurdist and silly works that challenged
conventional ideas about the meaning of art.
“Isn’t it fantastic that we are all standing here looking at peanut
butter?” Schippers told journalists gathered at the Central Museum in
Utrecht in 1997 where Pindakaasvloer was on display for the second time.
Schippers created the work as part of a Floor Covering Series, which
also included floors covered with glass shards and salt.
The aroma, redolent of breakfasts and lunch boxes, is what lingers with
many who experience the work first hand. Museum staff directed visitors
for the opening to “follow the smell” which was wafting by the ticket
counter, three floors below where the artwork is laid out.
“The thing I remember is the smell,” Mieke Weismann told The Associated
Press. The food photographer and writer saw the 1997 exhibition as a
teenager.
The art installation may not be for everybody. A sign at the museum's
entrance warns visitors with peanut allergies that they might not want
to enter the space.
It took two employees of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen several days
to spread 40 buckets of peanut butter across a 25-square-meter
(270-square-foot) hexagon last week.
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Workers spread peanut butter on a floor to recreate the "Peanut
Butter Floor" artwork in tribute to Dutch artist Wim T. Schippers at
the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Netherlands, Friday,
July 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Mouneb Taim)
 “It was a lot of work,” Leon Duenk,
one of the two men who installed the artwork, told AP.
The pair used drywall trowels to smear the peanut butter to a
thickness of 2 centimeters (0.8 inch).
Prior to his death the museum and Schippers discussed how to
recreate the work in the future, producing a 20-point plan that
included the requirement to apply the peanut butter “as smoothly and
boringly as possible” and that “no one is supposed to stand in, or
lie down on the peanut butter.”
Schippers did not specify the size or shape of the work, but he did
say it needed to be smooth peanut butter and that he preferred the
Dutch peanut butter brand Calvé. The company donated 40 tubs of
peanut butter for the work.
Multiple visitors stepped into the sticky artwork when it was on
display in 2011. In 1997, the work was “vandalized” when a group of
people placed 12 slices of bread and several bags of hagelslag —
chocolate sprinkles commonly eaten on bread at breakfast in the
Netherlands — on the floor.
“It doesn’t look bad,” Schippers told Dutch newspaper Volkskrant at
the time. “The sprinkles have been applied with a sense of
proportion and a skillful hand.”
———
Associated Press writer Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands,
contributed.
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