Release the Beest at the PEM

Photo courtesty Peabody Essex Museum and Theo Jansen

Maybe you’ve already seen them, wooden and skeletal, almost floating across Crane’s Beach in Ipswich, or powering their way across the bricks near City Hall in Boston.

But now they are coming to Salem and the Peabody Essex Museum.

The Peabody Essex Museum kicks off the first U.S. tour featuring Theo Jansen’s famed kinetic sculptures. Dynamic and interdisciplinary, Jansen’s Strandbeests (beach animals) blur the lines between art and science, sculpture and performance.

The exhibition will celebrate the thrill of the Strandbeests’ unique locomotion as well as the processes that have driven their evolutionary development on the Dutch seacoast. The exhibition premieres at PEM next week and then travels to Chicago and San Francisco.

“Since 1990, I have been occupied creating new forms of life,” Jansen writes on his website. “Not pollen or seeds, but yellow plastic tubes are used as the basic material of this new nature. I make skeletons that are able to walk on the wind, so they don’t have to eat. Over time, these skeletons have become increasingly better at surviving the elements such as storm and water and eventually I want to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.”

There will be special extended hours for the opening of the exhibition on Thursday, Sept. 17 with extended hours from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m.

Access to the exhibition begins at 6 p.m. on that day, and museum officials are expecting a large crowd. The event will also include a cash bar courtesy of the Hawthorne Hotel.

The exhibition, in Dodge Gallery 2, runs through Jan. 3 of 2016.

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 kinetic 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.