"Maman" de Louise Bourgeois

The giant bronze spider crouching beside the Guggenheim Museum stands thirty feet high. Louise Bourgeois built this creature in nineteen ninety-nine, naming it Maman after her own mother, who worked as a tapestry restorer. Beneath the tangled metal legs, a mesh sac holds twenty-six white marble eggs. While people often fear spiders, Bourgeois saw them as protective weavers. She kept the sculpture here permanently because the scale of the architecture finally provided a home that did not dwarf the spider.