Jerry Smith recalls a fair, if potentially bubble-bursting, warning from a professor during their first week as a CSU anthropology student in 2011: “You are not going to be Indiana Jones.”
Smith understood the professor was tamping their expectations – but a decade-plus later, Smith has stood in a chamber with the Lost Ark of the Covenant – just like Indy – thanks to their liberal-arts education.
Smith (‘13), who uses they/them pronouns, works as the associate collections manager at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, which proclaims to be “the first museum to focus exclusively on storytelling through images.”
Cofounded by filmmaker George Lucas – who studied anthropology in junior college – the museum, set to open in 2026, includes a collection of diverse media and artworks, everything from classical sculptures to comic art, book, and magazine illustrations, Renaissance paintings, and Star Wars speeders. (The Historic Lucasfilm Archives, which include art and props from Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and other movies, is part of the museum’s collection).
“The collection of the Lucas Museum is really unique,” Smith said. “We're a museum whose focus is the art of storytelling, which can encompass a lot of ideas as opposed to a typical art museum that is focused more on the formal qualities of artwork. We’re interested in the stories the artwork tells.”
As a collections manager in a new museum, Smith’s job encompasses plenty of project management. Leading a small team of technicians, Smith manages many aspects of the storage and preservation of objects in the museum’s collection, including packing, movement, and tracking of objects, and the maintenance of environmental and pest controls. That has included visits to Lucasfilm archives, leading Smith to work around and handle impressive yet eclectic materials. At times, Smith may be inventorying or working with Norman Rockwell paintings or helping position a 2,000-pound Roman statue; other times, they are bumping up against Hollywood treasures.
“One day [while moving other items] I was, literally, standing next to the two arks of the covenant from the movie,” Smith said, “and I was thinking, ‘Your life really can end up in the weirdest and most interesting places that you're not expecting.’ It felt like a full circle moment.”
Smith was meant for anthropology perhaps before they truly realized. Growing up on a farm in Greeley, Smith walked fields collecting found objects and imagining the people and stories that left them behind. It was a diversion, not a career. After high school, they played in a punk band, worked as a box truck driver, tried out farming, and studied recording engineering – without finding a spark. Then Smith took a few anthropology classes at community college. “I fell in love with anthropology, but I wasn’t quite sure where it could lead,” they said.
Smith started at CSU as a nontraditional student in their early 30s in 2011. Undeterred by that instructor’s warning about the not-quite-celebrity prospects for anthropology majors, Smith befriended a graduate teaching assistant, Chris Johnston (M.A. '16), who invited them to see the CSU Archaeological Repository. In the repository, Smith picked up a centuries-old stone tool, able to see and interpret the strike marks knapped by people.
“You could see where they flaked the stone off this tool, and then it becomes a connection to somebody in the past,” Smith said. “It just clicked. That really started it for me that I'm going to be working with objects as much as I possibly can.” Their archaeology and anthropology classes were teaching them to read the stories in found objects.
Smith studied both cultural anthropology and archaeology while at CSU, including attending the Archaeology Field School, with Professor Jason LaBelle, and completing a practicum in the repository with support from LaBelle and Johnston.
“I knew I wanted to have those actual hands-on skills as well as be able to write a good paper,” said Smith of taking advantage of fieldwork and practicum opportunities. “The other thing I learned on the field school that was super important: I learned how to work on a team in what can, sometimes, be intense situations.”
For a capstone project, Smith decided to identify and catalog objects from the Fort Collins Museum (now called the Museum of Discovery). Recognizing their mix of interests, Smith’s advisor, Professor Emeritus Kate Browne, suggested they look into graduate study in museum studies, leading Smith to pursue a museology/museum studies master’s degree at University of Washington. [CSU Anthropology and Geography now offers an Undergraduate Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies Certificate including several museum-studies courses but did not have this available when Smith was a student.]
“Having the freedom in ato take all these classes, I developed a larger view for how I think about people and objects and organizations,” Smith said. “I still think about and draw from classes I took. That’s something that comes up as part of who I am.”
While at Washington, a fellow graduate student invited Smith to a field research project in Honduras because of their field-school experience. The project turned out to be led by CSU archaeology professor Chris Fisher. Smith made a new connection since they never had Fisher as a professor. They also gained valuable work experience as the archaeology laboratory manager, tasked with cataloging, handling, and packing artifacts found at the archaeological site.
After graduate school, Smith worked several jobs as an art handler in Denver, learning fundamentals of museum packing and project management. In 2017, Smith landed a position as a senior collections management technician with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
“I never intended to work in the art-museum world but that was a big opportunity to have my first full-time job doing what I planned to do, which is work in collections management,” Smith said.
As a technician, Smith was part of a team of 40 people charged with packing the full collection while they worked at the museum, gaining further experience in collections and preparing for a management role. When the Lucas Museum announced the opportunity, Smith was ready.
At the Lucas Museum, Smith is not only helping oversee the physical setup but is also drafting the rules and organizational framework for the new museum’s collections management department.
“I have an affinity for writing guidelines and setting up protocols and things like that,” Smith said. “Now that I'm more in a leadership and management position, I really love being a part of a project that's bigger than the object.”
After an adventurous and meandering journey that didn’t quite lead where they expected, Jerry Smith could hardly have found a more ideal job than working in museum collections with a focus on storytelling around objects.
“Holding an actual object that was made by human hands some time in the past is very meaningful to me,” Smith said. “I can be looking at it and I can see the way they thought about it and formed it. It tells a story. And that all started because of my time at CSU.”