The original paintings behind Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets go on public show from 5 November, in an exhibition the Haight Street Art Center is calling The Art of Metallica. It runs until 10 January.
Those two images have been reproduced so many times that it is easy to forget they began as objects somebody painted. Standing in front of the artwork at its real size is a different experience from forty years of seeing it at twelve centimetres square, and that is the whole argument for the show.
Around them sits the rest of it: poster art across the band's live history, from flyers for early shows to material from recent tours, fan tributes sent from around the world, and a section on Pushead, whose drawings became inseparable from the band through the eighties and nineties.
Brian Lew, the curatorial advisor and co-author of Murder in the Front Row, frames it as a city story as much as a band one, arguing that the band's visual identity grew into a part of how the music is heard.
The venue is in the city where the band found their first audience, which is why the exhibition folds in pieces of local music history alongside the band's own.