{"id":797445,"date":"2026-10-09T22:08:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T22:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/797445\/"},"modified":"2026-10-09T22:08:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T22:08:12","slug":"the-lucas-museum-of-narrative-art-makes-room-lots-of-it-for-murals-by-banksy-baca-and-others-the-art-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/797445\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art makes room, lots of it, for murals by Banksy, Baca and others – The Art Newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the top floor of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art<\/a>, which opened to the public<\/a> last month, is a gallery some visitors might miss, partly because they have just explored the many galleries on the second floor below, and partly because they have to find just the right elevator to get there.\u00a0This gallery is devoted to murals, not a typical category for an art museum but fitting for a city amply dotted with murals.<\/p>\n

Perhaps more unexpected is the gallery\u2019s prevalence of art that is overtly political in ways the rest of the museum largely skirts.\u00a0Take the huge reproduction of Diego Rivera\u2019s 1933 magnum opus for Rockefeller Center in New York to the right as you enter, very pro-worker and somewhat anti-capitalist\u2014so much so that Nelson Rockefeller had it demolished and Rivera subsequently created a smaller version in Mexico City, on which this reproduction is based.<\/p>\n

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A view of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art’s murals gallery, with a reproduction of a Diego Rivera mural (right) and sketches for Judy Baca’s The Great Wall of Los Angeles murals (left) Photo by Stefanie Keenan\/Getty Images for Lucas Museum of Narrative Art<\/p>\n

In the adjoining gallery are 12 works by the British street art prankster Banksy. The fact that these works\u2014some reproduced in Banksy\u2019s studio and two on loan\u2014are in an institutional setting at all is unusual, as the anonymous artist has generally avoided museum shows.\u00a0Information about his contributions to the museum was so closely guarded that most museum staff did not know what would fill these spaces until the media preview.<\/p>\n

Though Banksy has long worked anonymously, speculation about his identity has been widespread for decades\u2014earlier this year, an extensive Reuters investigation that identified him<\/a> as Robin Gunningham, a conclusion reached by some previous investigations.\u00a0In an interview with The Art Newspaper, the Lucas Museum\u2019s chief executive Tracey Bates could not explain how Banksy\u2019s works got to the institution.<\/p>\n

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A mural featuring one of Banksy’s most famous images, on the fifth floor of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Photo \u00a9 Scarlet Cheng<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s an incredible living artist of our time, but an incredibly elusive artist,\u201d she says. \u201cI would say that George has always been a huge advocate for muralists all around the world, and he\u2019s always been a big fan of Banksy. So it\u2019s been a real meeting of minds with the two of them.\u201d (A recent Wall Street Journal<\/a> profile revealed that Banksy\u2019s work played a central role in Lucas\u2019s courtship of the executive Mellody Hobson, to whom he is now married and with whom he co-founded the museum.)<\/p>\n

Banksy\u2019s works at the Lucas Museum are accompanied by simple labels that provide little to no context, as is true throughout most of the institution. The most recognisable mural is Girl with Balloon, an image stencilled onto walls in different parts of London starting in 2002. It depicts a young girl with windblown hair as she reaches out to a red balloon that is floating away.\u00a0It is painted on what looks like a thick chunk of wall, as if it had been jackhammered from its original urban location.\u00a0Another that may be familiar is the maquette for the sculpture Flag Man, which appeared at Waterloo Place<\/a> in London earlier this year\u2014a suited man blithely marching forward, holding up a huge flag in one hand as its drapery blows back across his face.<\/p>\n

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Several Banksy murals on the fifth floor of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Photo by Stefanie Keenan\/Getty Images for Lucas Museum of Narrative Art<\/p>\n

There is also a Banksy installation on the museum\u2019s second floor, providing a bit of black humour.\u00a0It features a pair of lion sculptures on pedestals, like those you might find flanking a Beaux-Arts building. Except on closer look, the one on the left is holding a whip in its jaw, and its muzzle is bloodied. The only other sign of the lion tamer is on the floor\u2014a black top hat laying on its side.\u00a0The wall label reads: Pair of ornamental garden Lions with added parts, 2026.<\/p>\n

Wall-sized stories<\/p>\n

The fifth-floor gallery, with its 25ft-high ceilings, is ideal for showing off murals, though there are also plenty of preparatory renderings and sketches on view.\u00a0\u201cWe have a lot of mural studies in the collection,\u201d says the museum\u2019s senior curator, Ryan Linkof.\u00a0Also on display\u00a0are drawings and paintings by John Biggers, Dean Cornwell and Charles White.<\/p>\n

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Judith F. Baca, final coloration for The Birth of Rock and Roll, from The Great Wall of Los Angeles 1950, mural in Los Angeles, California, 1983 Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, 2018.34.6.5.20. \u00a9 1980 Judith F. Baca.<\/p>\n

Facing the Rivera mural are colour preparatory drawings for the epic, The Great Wall of Los Angeles<\/a> (1974-present), a people\u2019s history of Los Angeles rendered on walls flanking the Tujunga Wash in the San Fernando Valley.\u00a0Conceived by Judy Baca, the project was begun in 1974 and executed during the summers by students and community members. Baca \u201cenvisioned a long narrative of another history of California, one which included ethnic peoples, women and minorities who were so invisible in conventional textbook accounts\u201d, the artist writes on the project\u2019s website. (In 2021 the Mellon Foundation awarded a $5m grant to Baca and her team to extend the mural and the history from the 1960s to 2019\u2014work that is due to be completed in 2028, in time for the summer Olympic Games.)<\/p>\n

Murals were always going to figure prominently in the museum\u2019s collection and galleries, Linkof says. \u201cIllustration is important to us, both in terms of a professional category of people who are illustrators, but also this idea of illustrating stories,\u201d he says. \u201cMurals are fundamentally a form of illustration, and they often tell histories in a very specific way\u2014social concerns expressed in really clear, didactic ways because they\u2019re meant for broad public consumption.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the top floor of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which opened to the public last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":797446,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,7170,1120,96,22012,41653,10345,19344,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-797445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-banksy","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-lucas-museum-of-narrative-art","tag-murals","tag-museums-heritage","tag-public-art","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=797445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/797446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=797445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=797445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}