Banksy Gets Museum Walls at George Lucas’s New Los Angeles Museum

Banksy has spent a career steering clear of museums. Now a dozen of his works hang on the fifth floor of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, and most of the staff didn’t know what was going up until the press preview, The Art Newspaper reports.

The $1 billion museum, founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, opened to the public on Sept. 22 in Exposition Park, near USC. Most of the Banksy works were re-created in his studio and two are on loan. They include “Girl with Balloon,” the image he has stencilled around London since 2002, here on a slab that looks jackhammered out of a wall, and the maquette for “Flag Man,” the suited figure that appeared at Waterloo Place earlier this year.

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The museum’s chief executive, Tracey Bates, told the paper she can’t explain how the works got there, but she can explain the fit.

George has always been a huge advocate for muralists all around the world, and he’s always been a big fan of Banksy. So it’s been a real meeting of minds with the two of them.

Tracey Bates, CEO, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, The Art Newspaper

The neighbouring gallery turns political in a way the rest of the building mostly avoids. It faces a huge reproduction of Diego Rivera’s 1933 Rockefeller Center mural, the pro-worker painting Nelson Rockefeller had demolished, with colour studies by Judy Baca for The Great Wall of Los Angeles, her people’s history of the city painted along the Tujunga Wash. One study is titled “The Birth of Rock and Roll.”

Senior curator Ryan Linkof says murals belong in a museum built around illustration.

Murals are fundamentally a form of illustration, and they often tell histories in a very specific way—social concerns expressed in really clear, didactic ways because they’re meant for broad public consumption.

Ryan Linkof, senior curator, The Art Newspaper

That’s the museum’s whole pitch. More than 90% of what’s on view comes from Lucas’s own collection of illustration, comics, manga, storyboards and paintings made for films, plus a gallery of original Star Wars costumes and vehicles, according to The Art Newspaper’s review. Jori Finkel gave Ma Yansong’s swooping building five stars and the exhibits two, calling the collection patchy.

The Banksy walls come with basic labels and almost no context, so the work does the talking. Baca’s team is still adding to The Great Wall itself, extending it from the 1960s to 2019, with completion due in 2028, in time for the Los Angeles Olympics.