Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens in Los Angeles
After years of preparation and even longer planning, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will finally open its doors to the public on Tuesday, September 22, becoming, according to its founders, the first institution created specifically from the idea that visual storytelling in all its forms deserves to be treated as a single continuous tradition, rather than as a hierarchy with painting at the top and comics somewhere at the bottom. Founded by film director George Lucas and his wife, businesswoman Mellody Hobson, the museum seeks to trace the history of storytelling through images from prehistoric cave art to illustration, comic books, murals and cinema, arguing that the desire to tell stories through images is a continuous presence in human history, regardless of the medium of expression or perceived prestige.
The building itself, a sprawling 300,000-square-foot structure designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects in collaboration with Stantec, is located in Exposition Park and houses over 100,000 square feet of exhibition space spread across over thirty individual rooms. Inside, a collection ranging from Artemisia Gentileschi and Frida Kahlo to Norman Rockwell, Robert Colescott, Frank Frazetta and Robert Crumb is on display, intentionally combining canonical fine art with popular and commercial imagery that museums have historically kept at a distance. The holdings also include the complete Lucas archive, spanning the period 1971 to 2012, providing visitors with access to filmmaking materials related to Lucas's own career, along with centuries of pictorial and printed history. A free research library and Skywalker Grill complement the visitor amenities.At the same time, the surrounding thirteen-acre campus includes a new park space designed by Mia Leerer of Studio-MLA.
Lucas presented the project as a long-overdue recognition of artists whose work has shaped the collective imagination without always receiving institutional approval. “The artists in this collection didn’t just create images; they connected our modern imagination with our ancient emotions, with shared beliefs, creating a community,” he said, arguing that their work, spanning multiple genres, art forms and centuries, should be exhibited in museums alongside more traditionally recognized art forms. Hobson described the ambition behind the breadth of the collection in a more personal way, saying the aim was to create something that would allow visitors from vastly different backgrounds to walk through the same doors and find themselves reflected in the galleries.
Museum CEO Tracy Bates expressed similar optimism, describing Lucas and Hobson's belief that visual storytelling can unite entire societies around shared values, not just individuals. Architect Ma Yansong, for his part, spoke of wanting the building to feel as free and dreamlike as a cloud, designed using what he called emotional architecture, flowing and organically integrated into the Exposition Park, as if it grew there naturally rather than being built. The inaugural exhibitions, featuring more than 1,300 works, begin on the ground floor with a survey exhibition entitled “The History of Narrative Art: Heroes, Myths, the Sacred,” which explores how image-making gave birth to mythologies that could shape communities and create entire belief systems.Along with original works from the collection, this first room features amazingly accurate reproductions of works of art and archaeological remains collected from around the world and created in collaboration with institutions such as the Vatican Museums, which contributed to the reproduction of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Louvre, which helped create the image of winged bulls with human heads from the palace of Sargon II, the National Museum and Research Center of Spain in Altamira (for its ancient cave paintings) and the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico (for the Aztec sunstone). The high-resolution scans obtained during the reproduction process were returned to each partner institution, transforming the collaboration from a simple information extraction to a kind of two-way exchange.
On the upper floors the collection is organized thematically and by type of art. Galleries on the fourth and fifth floors explore recurring themes such as love, family and community across generations, presenting works by artists as diverse as Vincent van Gogh, Jacob Lawrence, Beatrix Potter and Ernie Barnes. Genre exhibitions span fantasy, romance and adventure, featuring works by artists such as Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, while select installations focusing on comics, manga, graphic novels, photography and murals showcase the work of artists such as Charles Schulz, Frank Miller, Takashi Murakami, Robert Capa, Diego Rivera and Judith F. Baca. Select galleries also pay tribute to prominent American illustrators of the twentieth century, including Norman Rockwell, N.C.Wyatt and Maxfield Parrish.
The cinema features a special "Star Wars in Motion" exhibit, drawn from the Lucas archives and highlighting the land vehicles featured in the first six films of the saga, from Luke Skywalker's speeder to the earliest version of General Grievous' wheeled motorcycle. A separate installation pays tribute to the architectural work of Ma Yansong, viewing his designs, including the museum building itself, as forms of narrative art in their own right.
The mural gallery on the fifth floor explores large-scale public histories, drawing on Judith F. Baca's extensive archive, including her half-mile "History of California" mural, as well as works by Diego Rivera, street artist JR, and previously unseen works received directly from Banksy's studio.
Two theaters are included in the opening program. The Robert Flaherty Theater is dedicated to documentary filmmaking, while the Slavko Vorkapić Theater, named after the editing pioneer who once headed the film department at the University of Southern California, where Lucas later studied, celebrates the technical and sensory aspects of cinema itself. Both theaters operate as continuous, open-air venues rather than as venues with a fixed schedule of shows. Outside, Leerer's redesigned landscaping has replaced a former parking lot with drought-tolerant native plants, more than 300 new trees, a hanging garden, an amphitheater and a waterfall fountain, creating a significant new public green space in South Los Angeles alongside 10 monumental outdoor sculptures.