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.