Frank O. Gehry, the well-known architect responsible for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, also designed the exhibition installation using basic industrial materials such as rubber and stainless steel. While everyone may not collect vintage motorcycles, nearly everyone over 16 has a motorcycle story they could tell. The show presents motorcycles as art objects, but they're also things that people can imagine themselves as riding. It's almost like looking at clothes. Fashion is about design, but it's also about persona and image.
Motorcycles are certainly about image and character and identity.
The exhibition was organized and curated by Thomas Krens, the museum's director, who worked with curatorial advisors Ultan Guilfoyle and Charles Falco, a professor of physics at the University of Arizona and noted motorcycle historian. Quite some time ago we had this notion of surveying the century in a different way, and Tom Krens came up with the idea of motorcycles. Motorcycles uniquely still retain those mythologies. The museum put a high priority on finding examples which were not only rare or collectible but could stand on their own as aesthetic designs. The organizing team also looked for machines which had cultural and historical significance.