The Jar Jar Binks of LA museums?

Hola, LA:

I’m culture writer Carolina A. Miranda and I’ve been felled by the gnarliest spring flu. But I’ve used the down time constructively to catch up on documentary watching.

I was absolutely riveted by Matt Wolf’s two-part series, Pee-Wee as Himself. It’s a complex portrait of Paul Reubens, a performer who gleefully disregarded the boundaries of genre — taking elements of ‘50s-era children’s television, avant-garde performance art, improvisational comedy, and throwing them all into the cultural Cuisinart. But it’s the ways in which Reubens obscured his sexuality and his identity that imbues the film with its poignant sense of heartbreak. What do we lose when we give up critical facets of our true selves?

Wolf sat down for an interview with KCRW’s Madeleine Brand to discuss the challenge of filming an entertainer who was notoriously reticent about ceding control.
The director also wrote a gorgeous essay about it for Vulture.

Plus, here’s what else is on my watch list (dig in below):

The giant sucking sound at the Lucas Museum
A member of Pussy Riot is coming to MOCA!
And because it’s documentary week here at Art Insider, join me for a screening of Out of the Picture — a doc about art critics!

The featured image features shows performer Paul Reubens in an old photograph — as seen in the HBO documentary Pee-Wee as Himself. (Getty / HBO)

The Billionaire Museum

The Lucas Museum under construction in Exposition Park in early 2025. (Eric Furle, Sand Hill Media / JAKS Productions)

On June 27, 2017, the Los Angeles City Council gathered to vote to approve a proposed museum in Exposition Park, whose construction and programming was to be funded by billionaire filmmaker George Lucas of Star Wars fame. For years, Lucas had tried to plant his namesake museum, which will gather his private collection of film memorabilia, illustration, painting and drawing, in other cities — San Francisco and Chicago. But LA greeted him with open arms and a prime piece of public land. City Council President Herb Wesson set the mood at the meeting by stating: “Let’s just applaud for the heck of it because this is a good day.”

The Council’s discussion centered largely on the museum’s programming. Then director Don Bacigalupi described education as residing “at the heart of the museum’s mission,” and proceeded to describe “a whole host” of programs geared at children of all ages. Later, when Mellody Hobson, the museum’s board co-chair (who also happens to be married to Lucas), took to the dais, she reaffirmed the commitment to education, noting that there were 100 schools within close proximity of the museum’s chosen site. “When we think about this museum, it's not just a museum,” she said, “it is a place where not only students and children and adults [will come], but schools and academics. People will come from all over the world to learn.”

Which is why I was curious to read a report in The Times late last month that the museum laid off 14% of its full-time staff — largely from the education department. This followed the departure of the museum’s director Sandra Jackson-Dumont in late February. Part of what had made Jackson-Dumont a compelling hire was her background in education: for five years prior to joining the Lucas she had run the education department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now, with a year to go until the Lucas opened, Jackson-Dumont was gone and Lucas was appointing himself head of “content direction.”

A horizontal image shows a circular library space under construction.

The Lucas Museum's library under construction in 2023. (Roberto Gomez / USC School of Cinematic Arts)

Certainly, at the root of the problem is a muddled vision of what exactly the museum is supposed to be. As a former employee told Hyperallergic in late May, there has been a “core discrepancy between what George [Lucas] thinks a museum is and what the leadership thinks it is.”

From the get-go, Lucas has insisted on constructing a namesake museum from the ground-up in a major city. (No nice, renovated warehouses for him.) He has also insisted that it will focus on a grand category of art of his own description: narrative art, a.k.a. “visual art that tells a story.” Which sounds new, but is actually already a thing. In fact, it’s been a thing for thousands of years. And it is generally known by its format and medium, such as figurative painting, illustration, or sequential storytelling (which can include arts like comics or cinematic storyboarding).

I was skeptical of this absurd category when it was first announced. But as the museum progressed, I was intrigued by some of the appointments. The board brought on impressive leaders, such as LA curator Pilar Tompkins-Rivas, who has a solid track record of thoughtful and imaginative curation, as well as Jackson-Dumont. In this time, the museum also made some interesting, if eclectic acquisitions: from a Frida Kahlo self-portrait to preparatory drawings for an important LA community mural led by Judy Baca to a painting by satirist Robert Colescott. “Narrative art,” it seems, is simply stuff Lucas likes. (Blogger William Poundstone has been trying to make sense of the hodgepodge.)

A painting by Robert Colescott riffs on a famous image of George Washington crossing the Delaware with Black figures

Robert Colescott, George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware River: Page From an American History Textbook, 1975. (Lucas Museum of Narrative Art / Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / ARS)

But the dismissal of much of the education team — after going on and on about how education would be at the core of the institution — along with the fact that Lucas has now installed himself as the museum’s Dear Leader has sent my skepticism meter off the dial. In a recent report about the museum’s troubles in the New York Times, former MOCA curator Paul Schimmel said that museums often bear the stamps of their wealthy founders, like the Norton Simon in Pasadena or the Huntington in San Marino, founded by rail magnate Henry Huntington. “The uniqueness of each of these collections makes for something that’s remarkable,” he said. “If George Lucas needs to be the director to get this thing done, so be it.”

A fine idea in theory, except that Huntington didn’t demand public land for his project. And a billionaire in a room full of yes-men is not exactly the ideal condition in which to produce a compelling story of art. That is, after all, how we ended up with Jar Jar Binks.

Around the Internet

Pussy Riot during a performance at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin last year. (Max Avdeev)

Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot will stage a performance at MOCA Geffen starting June 5th that riffs on the nature of imprisonment. (Tune into KCRW’s Press Play on Wednesday to hear her in conversation with Madeleine Brand!)
Madeleine also has a terrific interview with artist Jeffrey Gibson, currently the subject of a solo show at the Broad.
Mary Louise Schumacher’s doc about art critics, Out of the Picture is screening on June 10th at the Japanese American National Museum. I’m in the doc and will be on hand for a discussion! Find tickets here.
Trump says he has fired curator Kim Sajet of the National Portrait Gallery, though it’s unclear whether he has the authority to do so.
Proposed cuts to the Smithsonian Institution’s budget would eliminate all funding for the Anacostia Community Museum and the National Museum of the American Latino.
The US art schools that are most dependent on international students.
Times art critic Christopher Knight digs into the very strange story of the barely existent Joshua Tree Art Museum.
Curator Koyo Kouoh died before she could organize the Venice Biennale. A team of curators and historians will see her vision through.
Culver City is moving forward with a work of public art by Charles Gaines.
Also Culver City: the city’s DMV office recently painted over a historic Chicano mural. Artist David Botello is trying to bring it back.
Hanna Rosin reviews Alison Bechdel’s latest graphic novel, Spent, which finds the artist turning ever inward.
Signing off with the best pizza in Los Angeles.

Thanks, as always, for reading! 🙏