The Amazing Spider-Mom?

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s huge Louise Bourgeois retrospective doesn’t open until Feb. 26, but the 97-year-old artist’s very imposing advance man — or woman; I can’t tell, and I wouldn’t know how to check even if I were willing to get close enough — is already perched outside the Hirshhorn’s Independence Avenue entrance. And if he/she/it creeps you out, well, at least know that isn’t the artist’s intent.

“Crouching Spider,” the 9-foot-high, bronze-and-steel arachnid Bourgeois completed in 2003, is one of several giant spiders the artist has made since the early 1990s. Bourgeois, who was born in Paris but emigrated to the United States in 1938, explained her fondness for spiders in 2007, when the largest of her spider sculptures, the 30-foot-high “Maman,” was first exhibited outside the Tate Modern art gallery in London.

“The spider is an ode to my mother,” Bourgeois said. “She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.”

Makes sense to us. Of course, if somebody builds a giant, unsettlingly lifelike mosquito out of bronze and steel and parks it outside the National Museum Natural History, or in the Smithsonian Sculpture Garden, then we’ll have to rethink everything. Or make a Japanese irradiated-monster movie. Or — most likely — just steer well clear of the National Mall.

If you go

‘Crouching Spider’

Where: Hirshorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Seventh Street and Independence Avenue SW

When: On view at the Hirshhorn’s Independence Avenue entrance through May 17; Louise Borgeois opens Feb. 26.

Info: Free; 202-633-4674; hmsg.si.edu

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