Beyond the frame: Lucas Museum curator Ryan Linkof on exploring places where history, art and popular culture meet

Long before Ryan Linkof was senior curator and head of film programs at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, he was the kind of kid who read Leonard Maltin’s annual movie guide cover to cover.

He also subscribed to movie magazines, worked at a video store and held jobs at movie theaters. “As long as I can remember, I have always loved film,” Linkof says. “Obsessed with it, actually.”

During his time as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, his interests expanded to exploring how imagery represented the cultures that produced it, whether as entertainment or art. That curiosity eventually led him to USC.

Linkof had read USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences Professor Vanessa Schwartz’s Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris and was drawn to her scholarship connecting cinema, art and popular visual culture.

At USC, Linkof found an intellectual home in the interdisciplinary field of visual culture, which allowed him to study cinema, research methods and art history. USC Annenberg Professor Sarah Banet-Weiser’s class “Introduction to Visual Studies” was just one example. “It was a really amazing opportunity to learn with people studying film history, art history, sociology and to see how those disciplines questioned subjects differently,” he says.

His dissertation traced the origins of paparazzi photography, examining questions about celebrity, privacy and portraiture that would become even more relevant with the rise of social media.

As graduation approached, Linkof began looking for ways to apply his skills in research, writing and interpreting objects while remaining in Los Angeles. Museums offered an answer. After volunteering at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s film program, he landed a curatorial fellowship in its photography department.

Within some five years at LACMA, Linkof worked on exhibitions across departments and contributed to several projects, including a major Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition with the Getty. He later joined the founding curatorial team of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, helping develop its inaugural exhibition and collection. That experience prepared him to help build another museum from the ground up. In 2018, Linkof became the first curator hired by the Lucas Museum.

The institution challenges traditional distinctions between fine and popular art — precisely the kind of boundaries Linkof learned to question as a USC graduate student. Working closely with founders George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, he has helped define the scope of a collection encompassing comic art, children’s book illustration, photography, painting, muralism and cinema. He also helped shape the museum’s galleries and exhibitions.

“I’ve stayed at the Lucas Museum for so long because there are so many things that are profoundly unique about it,” Linkof says. From the shape of the building to its location and vast resources in film and visual art, nothing like the Lucas Museum exists anywhere else, he adds. The museum will offer free admission to residents in the 90037 ZIP code so the adjacent community can visit free of charge. “It’s really special,” he adds.

Linkof is particularly excited about showcasing artists such as fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta, whose technically sophisticated paintings appeared on paperback covers, trading cards and puzzles but historically received little attention in traditional art history. “Lucas Museum’s curation opens up the scope of what can be considered art and really creates a platform for artists who haven’t had that before,” he says. “People are really hungry to see what’s beyond the traditional scope of art museums; I think it’s coming into the world at the right time.”

Linkof’s connection to USC is now not only intellectual but geographic: The Lucas Museum is in Exposition Park, directly across from the university that helped launch his career.

In some ways, Linkof never really left USC: He and Schwartz, who he says introduced him to connections that opened doors in his career, remain close. He has taught classes in the Department of Art History at USC Dornsife. Most recently, he developed a symposium titled “Speculative Visions: Science Fiction and American Visual Culture” with the Visual Studies Research Institute and ONE Archives at the USC Libraries at USC, with support from the Lucas Museum and the Getty Foundation’s PST ART grant.

“It doesn’t surprise me that Ryan ended up with the career he has,” Schwartz says. Linkof’s USC training prepared him to view images that may have fallen outside the traditional art historical canon — and that’s something that Schwartz and other faculty at USC did deliberately. “We put students in conversation with other fields,” she adds. “Whether you work at a university, museum, cultural institution or archive, the fundamental training is the same: deep knowledge, strong research skills and an understanding of the questions to ask.”

For someone whose career has been built by crossing boundaries — between film and art, scholarship and popular culture — the proximity of the Lucas Museum to the University Park Campus seems fitting.

“It’s really hard for me to imagine having this career without USC,” Linkof says. “Coming to the Lucas Museum just feels like a natural progression of the work that I did there.”