WAG wraps exhibition showcasing fine art of a sweet bike

Growing up in rural Manitoba, Allen Hildebrand was always tinkering with something. While on a flight to Mexico in 2016, it felt like an act of fate when he picked up a magazine and opened it to the ultimate project.

“It had this dirty old bike on it and I was like, ‘I want one of these in my life,’” Hildebrand says.

After 10 years, he is running out of space in his garage after filling it with four bikes, two of which are featured in a pop-up motorcycle exhibition at the WAG-Qaumajuq that ends Thursday.

The art gallery is broadening the perspective of what fine art can be with Art Moto: Where Design Meets the Road, featuring 25 motorbikes hand-built by local enthusiasts and set up in the gallery’s main hall and skylight.

The exhibition is in partnership with global motorcycle initiative Moto Social — which hosts events at cities all over Canada and the United States, as well as Belgium, Germany, Hungary, New Zealand and South Africa — and highlights the craftsmanship of Winnipeg’s biker community.

Hildebrand said it’s amazing to see his work set up in the WAG.

“At a venue like this — c’mon, who couldn’t like this?” he says, gesturing to the variety of custom and classic bikes in the gallery’s main hall, including a restored 1912 Indian Board Track Racer.

Hildebrand’s first featured bike is a customized café racer-style bike painted baby blue, an homage to race cars in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. He also has a distressed Harley-Davidson made to look like something post-apocalyptic.

The exhibition will be a revelation for people seeing the custom bikes for the first time, says Rachel Baerg, head of education and programs for the art gallery.

“This kind of craftsmanship and engineering is a form of cultural expression, it’s a form of art. I think it’s going to be an eye-opener for sure,” she says.

Baerg — who, along with her husband, is a motorcycle fan — says the event has been in the making for five months and started when head of museum services Radovan Radulovic first brought forward the idea.

Radulovic is a bike enthusiast and initially suggested it to Baerg for their WAG Wednesdays. Discussions grew and it turned into a full two-day exhibition.

Baerg says WAG Wednesdays, during which the WAG is open with free admission from 5 to 9 p.m., have been an opportunity for the gallery to host unconventional work and reshape how people think about fine art.

“I think we’re all creative people and we express ourselves in different ways, so it doesn’t just have to be specifically traditional art,” she says.

Instead of the gallery being the authority on what’s considered fine art, they’re looking to the community to influence what they put on display.

“It’s a really exciting time in our evolution; I think we’re really changing, and our eyes are opening up to the fact we need to hear from many different voices,” Baerg says.

It’s crazy to see the work done by the motorcycle community at the WAG, says Steve Xoumpholphakdy, co-ordinator and lead host of Moto Social in Winnipeg.

Many of the bikes at the show are backyard builds, including his own 1984 Harley-Davidson, which took him 30 hours to restore.

The biking community in Winnipeg is huge, he says, and their monthly meetups are slowly becoming one of the Moto Socials with the highest attendance.

“We did our first ever event this year at Wayback Burgers on Pembina, and we made it to about 425 (people) when I told everyone to stop counting because we couldn’t keep track anymore,” he says.

He is happy to see the work recognized at the WAG-Qaumajuq and hopes to see more events like it happen annually.

tiago.resko@winnipegfreepress.com