LA's Most Adventurous Exhibit At The Petersen

“This exciting, first-ever collection of round-the-world overland racing and off-world overland vehicles is the perfect pandemic escape hatch,” said exhibit curator Paul d’Orleans, co-founder of the New York-based Motorcycle Arts Foundation, exhibit co-sponsor. “Most of these extraordinary machines have never been publicly displayed and absolutely radiate the spirit of adventure—some even retain their original accessories, 90 years later.” 

The vibe around us certainly captured that spirit of adventure, along with a pure love for the nostalgic. The Petersen’s third-floor Richard Varner Family Gallery (which is still running) has been transformed into an ADV time-capsule from the early 1900s, including George Wyman’s 1903 California, the first two-wheeled motorized vehicle to travel coast-to-coast from San Francisco to New York. For those keeping score, just 20 days later, Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson accomplished the same feat in the 1903 Winton Vermont car.  

Sponsored by Harley-Davidson, the exhibit also showcases the LiveWire Motorcycle, Harley’s first foray into electric vehicles, and the 1974 BMW R60/6 driven by Elspeth Beard, the first British woman to ride around the world.  Additionally peppered throughout the exhibit is a handful of rally cars that ran the legendary Baja 1000 race, including the 1969 Ford Bronco “Big Oly” and the Honda N600 Baja, Honda’s first factory race car to hit stateside.

During the commemorative event opening the exhibit, d’Orleans hosted a panel of motorcycle enthusiasts associated with various bikes featured in the exhibit, including Doug Wothke, Torsten Zorn, Julian Heppekausen, Dan Green and Travis Fulton. 

But this exhibit didn’t just focus on the motorbikes of years past or even on anything confined to the terrestrial. It also looked ahead to the future and to the stars. Torsten Zorn, lead spacecraft engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, helped provide two model Mars Rovers for the exhibit (the originals still being on the Red Planet, of course). 

“It’s an interesting synergy between ‘ADV Overland’ and what we’re trying to do on Mars,” explained Zorn. “Anybody who has ridden a car or bike off-road understands the importance of making decisions on routes when dealing with various terrain.”      

If you think about it, aren’t Mars Rovers just big, fancy motorcycles? Well, maybe that’s an oversimplification, but it's still tires and tread crunching gravel and, as long as you yearn to hear that sound, then you can be sure that ADV: Overland is worth checking out.  

“ADV: Overland” runs through March 2022.  Tickets can be purchased here.

Thumbnail credit: ADV Overland