If you tried to visit Strandbeest (Beach Animal in Dutch) on Crane Beach this summer you were probably out of luck.
The crowd clogged Argilla road for hours. Everyone was curious, but now through January you can visit the PEM to see what it is all about.
In the spirit of Leonardo da Vinci and the Wright brothers, Theo Jansen (born 1948, the Netherlands) has applied his background in art and engineering toward the creation of extraordinary self-propelled creatures called Strandbeests.
Made from simple materials such as PVC tubing and plastic bottles, these self-contained systems utilize available (and stored) wind power for their unique locomotion.
For the past 20 years Jansen has been perfecting his Strandbeest designs on the Dutch seaside while gaining international fame. A star of the TED Conference stage, Jansen has exhibited his work extensively in Asia and Europe and has been profiled by The New Yorker, CBS Sunday Morning, Huffington Post, The New York Times and NPR.
The Peabody Essex Museum is presenting the first major -American- exhibition of Theo Jansen’s famed kinetic sculptures.
Dynamic and interdisciplinary, Jansen’s Strandbeests blur the lines between art and science, sculpture and performance.
The exhibition celebrates the thrill of the Strandbeests’ unique locomotion as well as the processes that have driven their evolutionary development on the Dutch seacoast. The animated sculptures are accompanied by artist sketches, facilitated demonstrations of the creatures’ complex ambulatory systems, a hall of “fossils” as well as photography by Lena Herzog.