A Millennium Falcon, cow-mobile, dog-mobile and one-person fire engine were all part of the Lowell Kinetic Sculpture Race last year, each person-powered mobile piece of art and weirdness struggling to survive a 6-mile route of cobblestones, mud and water and pass a Market Street finish line.
The race, which takes place again Sept. 19, once had a version in Cambridge – part of loose collection of such annual events that range from Maine to Oregon.
The first was in 1969 in Ferndale, California, which still hosts a version, a “long and grueling” race that spans three days and covers more than 50 miles, said Michael Roundy, a University of Massachusetts at Lowell art professor. “It goes into the ocean. It crosses rivers. It goes through sand dunes.”
A Baltimore version also has an athletic, 15-mile course. One in Port Townsend, Washington, lasts two days and includes water and mud pit challenges like Lowell, throwing in a sand pit for good measure.
Cambridge’s races had a different focus, on art and whimsy rather on competition. They began as World Sculpture Racing, “completely designed around artists,” said Christian Herold, the last person to organize the events that became known as People’s Sculpture Races. Initial organizers Jeff Koetsch and Kirby Scudder even recruited participants like an art show, Herold said: “They would go look through galleries and portfolios and contact people whose work they liked.”
Science and art
The first race took place around the MIT Museum, then on Massachusetts Avenue near Central Square, as Koetsch and Scudder worked in collaboration with other artists with close school connections. Among them were Bill Wainwright and Pat Keck, who described it as “part street theater, part performance art, part sporting event,” recalled Greg Cook for WBUR. Rockland, Maine, now has a sculpture race that follows this model – basically “a loop around a bigger city block,” Roundy said.
Something combining science and art seemed perfect for Cambridge, also birthplace of the Ig Nobel Prizes, founded in 1991, and the Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses, founded in 2013, which both left to go globe-trotting. Ig Nobel winners were announced from Zurich on Sept. 3.
When last seen in Cambridge between 2015 and 2021, the races weren’t just part of the city’s summertime River Festivals. Herold organized a second series for the springtime Cambridge Science Festival. Instead of Memorial Drive, kids and families could run their creations around “this beautiful ridge of hills” at Danehy Park, he said.
The Cambridge versions were more about celebration than competition – “more of a parade,” Roundy said – and while kinetic sculpture is pedal powered, People’s Sculpture Race rules encourage works where participants have their feet on the ground.
A rhyming idea
The Cambridge event founders are thought by some as a “break-off faction of the original race” in California, said Roundy, race director for Lowell, “more interested in the art than racing.”
Only the last part is true, Herold said, despite the timing: The local founders’ World Sculpture Racing Society came along a year after the first California event. “Our guys claim they knew nothing about that race when they started theirs,” Herold said. “We didn’t know about it, and we can prove it.”
“Jeff and Kirby were artists and sculptors,” Herold said, and their idea was to upend the idea that their creativity would be judged, “because they were sick of being judged as artists by galleries. Their joke was that it was all about speed. And, as Jeff put it once, usually the best piece came last.”
The California event had gentler, simpler origins too, with a man named Hobart Brown and a couple of artist friends. One time in 1969, Brown added extra wheels to his son’s tricycle “and one of his artist friends was like, ‘Wow, that looks really cool! I’m going to make something too. Let’s race down Main Street on Mother’s Day in Ferndale,’” Roundy said. “That spurred a yearly event, and more and more artists started to join,” with the tests of vehicle resilience coming later to match the more rugged terrain of Northern California.
Ended during Covid
World Sculpture Racing didn’t have a reason – or the room – to leave behind its creative roots. It became part of the earliest Cambridge Arts River Festivals from 1982 to 1985, said Jason Weeks, executive director of the agency.
Herold, who was in the audience at those first events, came back from living in New York for a few years to find sculpture racing gone. He decided to restart it. “I connected with Kirby and Jeff, and they gave me the recipe,” he said. The resurgent events, now the People’s Sculpture Races, drew from 10 to 17 artists or teams and enjoyed River Festival crowds.
“We did it for five years,” Herold said, “and then Covid came along.”
The event’s final year was “an online sculpture race, as part of a virtual festival,” Weeks said.
Herold attended a 2022 sculpture racing conference at the Andres Institute of Art in Brookline, New Hampshire, to “see if there was collective energy among those that gathered to keep PSR going. It was my understanding that the decision was made at that time to generally sunset the effort,” Weeks said.
There wasn’t enough interest at the time to give to restart the events, Herold said. Even the website for People’s Sculpture Racing went offline this spring.
Up to Lowell
Now it’s the Lowell event that, like a very friendly “Mad Max: Fury Road,” draws energy north. The Kinetic Sculpture Race has included teams from Scul, once known as the Subversive Choppers Urban Legion, a group that builds “mutant bicycles” and is famous for its colorful Saturday night rides; this year’s race, the ninth since a launch in 2016, includes Somerville artist and video producer Alex Ezorsky, Roundy said.
Herold would restart the People’s Sculpture Races in Cambridge, he said, but not alone. “There is interest if someone else came along and had energy,” he said. “I would need at least one totally dedicated partner.”
“It’s so beautiful, all of it. It’s so much fun and so beautiful,” Herold said. “You know, at the first [event in 2015] I almost sat down and cried, because I realized I had been too busy organizing and never actually saw the race.”
Lowell Kinetic Sculpture Race, 9 to 5 p.m. Sept. 19, at and around 100 Market St., Lowell. Free.
