At the Lucas Museum, You Know More Than You Thought You Did

Most of the art that a museum owns isn't actually on the wall. It's usually downstairs, or in a warehouse somewhere else entirely, sitting in a crate, cataloged and climate-controlled as part of a permanent collection, which mostly just means it's permanently out of view. A museum like the Met owns something like a million and a half objects, and most of them are never on view at the same time. That's not really a knock on those museums, that's just how the system works: art gets acquired, and in some way it stops living out in the world and starts being stored by an institution instead.

That is not what happened with the art I grew up with. It came to me on a lunchbox, or a VHS tape, or off a spinner rack of comics at the drugstore, or on a poster pinned crooked to my bedroom wall, and nobody explained any of it to me first and nobody told me it counted as art. It just got to me directly, the way stories do before anyone teaches you to call them that.

I purposely walked into the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art without reading any other major press, any major analysis of the building (besides using my two eyes and watching it be erected over the last few years, and knowing it was designed by architect Ma Yansong of MAD), and I didn't want to overstudy the previous understandings of George Lucas' collection. I knew pieces and parts of all these stories, about how my hometown of San Francisco for some reason didn't want this museum or how Chicago was a potential location but it really felt like it should be Los Angeles and it should be exactly where it is in Los Angeles at Exposition Park. I wanted to feel like what I was seeing was completely original and fresh to me, and though I know that George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson founded the museum on the foundation and strength of storytelling, I am trying to make sure I was not swayed by other critics' ideas of storytelling.

A few minutes into the preview it is really clear to me: this is the entry point museum. Lucas' collection reflects a collective experience of how most of us are introduced to art and creativity. It's Norman Rockwell. It's Frank Frazetta. It's comics. It's film. It's Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother. It's Banksy. It's KAWS. It's costumes. It's, guess what: Star Wars. It's sports. It's manga. It's He-Man. It's The Wizard of Oz. It's MAD Magazine. These are the same kind of objects that would be sitting in storage somewhere else, and here they are right at eye level instead, with no wall of footnotes standing between you and them. It's the art we see, read, and experience as a collective but also in our rooms as kids, when we couldn't even process that what we were looking at was art; it was just the stories and the characters we loved. And that's part of what makes this museum feel different: it shows you how much you already knew about art, without asking you to prove it first. Most museums make you feel like you're behind, like everyone else did the reading and you didn't. Here you recognize the image before anyone tells you what it is, and that recognition feels less like a test and more like being invited into art history instead of quizzed on it. It's the art you bring your own memories to, not art you're told, gallery by gallery, to go make a memory of. So wandering through nearly 100,000 square feet of art, walking past a Robert Colescott masterpiece or Norman Rockwell's 100%-perfect-in-every-way Jury Room or a Frida or a new three-wall installation by Banksy, I'm struck by how much of this art has defined my life without me even realizing it. Art is all around us, and it didn't have to be in the history books, or the archive, or the storage room, first before we were allowed to understand it. This is mostly a living, breathing collection.

There are many highlights to this museum, and many will fly across the world to see Star Wars concept art and costumes, or some of Lucas' own collection of film history. But the subtle parts of this museum are in the comic book pages, or the fantasy art of Frazetta, or the sci-fi illustrations. Lucas' collection is dense, and I could nearly spend an entire day in the comics galleries. The Norman Rockwell gallery, too, although his work is sprinkled throughout the space, really stood out to me as the art of the American century. The mastery of his craft is clearly on display, but it was the civil rights advocacy, the spirit of his belief that a changing America was the best America, that his art was a story of the country but often the work being made in real-time, as editorial and commission, that struck me most. That's what alive means here, not nostalgia but work that was actually part of its own moment while it was still happening. It's alive, as is the work of Judith F. Baca, JR, and Gordon Parks, who all play vital roles in telling a story of space and place that often straddles the line of documentarian and fine art.

The Lucas Museum notes that "Narrative art is created to tell stories through images." And as much as you would say to yourself, "Well, isn't that all art's function; isn't its purpose always to tell stories?", I agree. But I think George Lucas has tried here to tell an audience that art is more alive than you are often told. Yes, if you live in the art world, you are blessed with the opportunities to see that art is not just in the history books, but most experiences that people have with art can feel dated, like going back in time, like visiting the crate instead of the thing that used to live in your room. Lucas has captured a spirit that the entry points and ongoing relationships we have with storytelling are a completely present tense activity and that art can be immediate. Walking back out into Exposition Park afterward, past families in Star Wars T-shirts and kids clutching toys from the museum shop that aren't really any different from what's hanging inside, it was hard not to think this was one of the only museums I've been to that sends its art back out into the world instead of just taking more of it in. —Evan Pricco