Ultan Guilfoyle, The Art of the Motorcycle

Ultan Guilfoyle is a filmmaker and an author, who co-curated the landmark 1998 exhibition “The Art of the Motorcycle” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. “Installing motorcycles in the rotunda was a thrill,” he recalls. “It was like taking sculptural, three-dimensional objects and putting them up in the space and allowing people to see them in a way they had never seen before.”

On this episode of the “Driven to Ride” podcast, Guilfoyle relates the story behind the exhaustive efforts to gather the astounding 111 motorcycles presented in the exhibition. “If you’re curating an art exhibition, say you’re doing Picasso, you know where all the Picassos are,” he tells host Mark Long. “You make 50 calls, and you’ve got 40 yeses and 10 nos. At least you got an idea. We had no idea.”

Co-curator Charles Falco and Guilfoyle had a list of 50 “must-have” motorcycles, without which they had little hope of achieving their lofty exhibition goals. Twenty-one of those machines were ultimately lent to the Guggenheim by the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum in Birmingham, Alabama. That, Guilfoyle says, led to a relationship with founder George Barber, a relationship that continues to this day.

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