George Lucas’s Long-Awaited Museum Is Finally Ready for Liftoff
Opening September 22 in Los Angeles, the otherworldly Lucas Museum of Narrative Art brings Vincent van Gogh and Frida Kahlo together with underground comics and Star Wars into a sweeping celebration of visual storytelling
George Lucas has spent decades building worlds on screens, but the prolific filmmaker behind Star Wars and Indiana Jones will soon unveil another kind of universe. More than a decade in the making, the sprawling Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will officially open in Los Angeles on September 22. Its circuitous origin story began with plans for Chicago before a series of false starts ultimately led Lucas and his wife, businesswoman Mellody Hobson, to choose Exposition Park in South Los Angeles, drawn in part by its surrounding communities and proximity to a staggering 500 schools within a five-mile radius. Ground broke the following year, setting in motion one of Southern California’s most ambitious new cultural institutions.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art proposes the enlightening idea that visual storytelling—from prehistoric cave paintings to contemporary cinema, and everything in between—constitutes a continuous artistic tradition through which societies convey their most salient values and beliefs. Lucas and Hobson founded the institution to examine that tradition across cultures and centuries while challenging longstanding distinctions between fine art and popular culture. Artemisia Gentileschi, Vincent van Gogh, and Frida Kahlo will be shown alongside flamboyant sci-fi illustrator Frank Frazetta and underground cartoonist R. Crumb. Film materials include the complete Lucas Archives from 1971 to 2012. Illustration and comics will receive equal standing alongside painting, photography, and sculpture.
“We wanted a museum unlike any other—one that brings people from every walk of life through the same doors,” Hobson says. “That’s why this collection holds so many different kinds of stories: so that more people can walk in and, in these galleries, see themselves—and the world they know—reflected back.” Lucas’s own collecting spans more than 50 years, encompassing American art and popular illustration alongside comics and cinematic material, while Hobson focused on African American art before their 2013 marriage, acquiring works by Kara Walker, Gary Simmons, and Norman Lewis. Together, they expanded their holdings to encompass Kahlo, Carrie Mae Weems, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Tamara de Lempicka, and Chuck Close.
That expansive collection finds an appropriately unconventional home in an otherworldly structure by MAD Architects founder Ma Yansong, who envisioned the 300,000-square-foot building with Stantec as a vast, cloud-like presence hovering above Exposition Park. Its exterior sweeps across 700 feet, with broad cantilevers lifting much of the five-story structure above the ground in a gesture that inevitably evokes science fiction. Nearly 1,300 individually configured fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels sheath its sinuous skin, each fabricated through a combination of robotics and handwork. Their enormous scale, averaging roughly eight by 32 feet, disappears into a continuous surface that appears soft and bulbous from afar. The building touches down at only a few points, leaving much of the ground open beneath its mass.
“I’m deeply grateful to George Lucas and Mellody Hobson for giving me the opportunity to create a building that will faithfully serve the visitors and the art while being as light and free as a cloud, or a dream,” says Ma, who eschewed rectilinearity and carried the architecture’s continuous curvature inside with futuristic tube-like elevators and an enormous central oculus that looks toward the sky. “The building invites everyone to participate in a journey of discovery.”
That voyage starts outside, where landscape architect Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA transformed a former parking lot into a verdant public park dotted with oaks, pines, jacarandas, and flowering plants that give portions of the campus distinctive textures inspired by California’s dramatic topography. More than 340 newly planted trees rise among indigenous and drought-tolerant vegetation across terrain constructed atop a new subterranean parking structure. Paths climb and descend across contoured ground, crossing bridges as they move between meadows and gardens. Ten monumental outdoor sculptures turn the freely accessible campus into an open-air gallery, among them Antonin Mercié’s David After the Combat, depicting the biblical hero after his victory over Goliath, and Fernando Botero’s voluptuous Maternity. Then come the Star Wars works, including statues of Yoda near Princess Leia freeing herself from Jabba the Hutt with the chain that bound her.
Those improbable juxtapositions offer a preview of the curatorial philosophy inside, where more than 1,300 works across 30-plus exhibition spaces advance the museum’s expansive definition of narrative art—and make a case for historically undervalued mediums such as illustration within the art historical canon. “The History of Narrative Art: Heroes • Myths • The Sacred” kicks off millennia ago, combining original works with high-fidelity reproductions of immovable masterpieces. Collaborations with institutions around the world yielded recreations of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, ancient paintings from Spain’s Altamira caves, and the Aztec Sun Stone. The sweeping chronology traces how civilizations have used images to inspire devotion and transmit social ideals through the ages.
Elsewhere, the museum organizes works around human experiences, such as love, family, childhood, and adventure. That approach places artists otherwise separated by medium, geography, and generation in conversation: Beatrix Potter’s charming storybook illustrations appears within the same broader inquiry as paintings by Charles White and Ernie Barnes, each using narrative to portray relationships and everyday life. Other galleries examine artists whose images became embedded in popular culture, with presentations devoted to Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Jessie Willcox Smith, Maxfield Parrish, and Thomas Hart Benton. “Star Wars in Motion” draws from Lucas’s archives to examine vehicles from his first six films, including Luke Skywalker’s Landspeeder and the first physical build of General Grievous’s Wheel Bike. Yet Star Wars, for all its gravitational pull, accounts for only seven percent of the museum’s holdings.
The museum also devotes ample space to scholarship. Its free Research Library occupies a horseshoe-shaped reading room and two additional floors, with holdings that span art history, cinema, folklore, children’s literature, and popular culture. More than 30,000 comic books are available alongside select holdings from the Skywalker Ranch Library, thousands of art books donated by Steve and Ann Martin, and 2,900 volumes from mythologist Joseph Campbell’s personal library. Campbell’s writings on the hero’s journey profoundly influenced Lucas as he developed Star Wars, giving the scholarly collection particular resonance. A pair of 299-seat theaters will explore cinematic history through continuous screenings.
Visitors can conclude their journey upstairs at Skywalker Grill, the museum’s 175-seat signature restaurant. Rockwell Group conceived the 3,600-square-foot dining room with midcentury yet futuristic references, wrapping the walls and ceiling in sinuous cherry wood panels and introducing luminous white onyx Corian surfaces around a sculptural central bar. Inspired by the hospitality of Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, his pastoral filmmaking retreat in Marin County, the restaurant serves California-driven American cuisine built around seasonal ingredients, from house-made pastas to crispy chicken Milanese and striped bass.
For all its intergalactic associations, the Lucas Museum stakes its greatest claim on something fundamentally terrestrial: humanity’s persistent urge to tell stories through pictures. “The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art was created to honor humanity’s stories and the artists who illustrate them,” Lucas says. “They deserve to be in a museum.”