True to its identify, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork in Los Angeles has had a protracted and twisting origin fantasy, however now, greater than a decade after the undertaking was first introduced, its founders—the Star Wars film-maker George Lucas and his spouse, Mellody Hobson, the president and co-chief government of Ariel Investments—have set a gap date: 22 September 2026.
Within the 13 years between the undertaking’s announcement and grand opening, it’s going to have modified cities twice—from San Francisco to Chicago to Los Angeles—grown in price range from round $700m to a reported $1bn, modified designs and leaders, added and shed workers, and amassed a wealthy and different assortment of greater than 40,000 works. Now its campus in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park is in superior phases of building, with the outside of its futuristic constructing by Ma Yansong of the structure agency Mad practically full and plantings already rising within the surrounding gardens designed by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA.
Lucas Museum plaza building in February 2025 © 2025 JAKS Productions. Photograph courtesy of USC Faculty of Cinematic Arts. Photograph by Roberto Gomez. All rights reserved
The constructing, a cloud- or spaceship-like kind rising from two bases, will home 100,000 sq. ft of exhibition house throughout 35 galleries. They may function thematic groupings round subjects together with love, work, journey and sports activities. The gathering spans an infinite vary of supplies—from historic artefacts and canonic art-historical figures like Frida Kahlo, John Singer Sargent, Robert Colescott and Thomas Hart Benton, to equally necessary figures from the worlds of comedian books and graphic novels, like Jack Kirby, Alex Raymond, Rafael Navarro, R. Crumb, Alison Bechdel and Chris Ware.
Frida Kahlo, Autorretrato dedicado al Dr. Eloesser (Self-portrait devoted to Dr Eloesser), 1940 Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork, Los Angeles. © 2025 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Belief, Mexico, CDMX / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The gathering can also be wealthy in images—by Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson and others—and consists of the Separate Cinema Archive, a group of supplies documenting the historical past of African American movie. It additional options extra well-liked artwork that linked with huge audiences via mass media, together with works by Beatrix Potter, Norman Rockwell, Ernie Barnes, Alphonse Mucha and Frank Frazetta.
Ernie Barnes, The Critic’s Nook, 2007 Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork, Los Angeles. Ernie Barnes Household Belief
“It is a museum of the individuals’s artwork—the photographs are illustrations of beliefs we reside with daily. For that purpose, this artwork belongs to everybody,” Hobson mentioned in an announcement. “Our hope is that as individuals transfer via the galleries, they may see themselves, and their humanity, mirrored again.”
Lucas will see his personal profession mirrored again within the galleries as properly, because the establishment will home the Lucas Archives—together with costumes, props, fashions and artwork associated to his movies.
Artist unknown, Polychrome Reduction Depicting the Afterlife of an Elite Official,round 2200BC-2000BC (Egypt, First Intermediate Interval) Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork, Los Angeles
For the reason that departure of the museum’s director and chief government Sandra Jackson-Dumont final February, Lucas has been “answerable for content material course”. In Could, the museum laid off 14% of its full-time workers and lower seven part-time roles.
The museum’s curatorial management consists of Pilar Tompkins Rivas (chief curator and deputy director for curatorial and collections), Ryan Linkof (senior curator) and Laela French (curator and head of the Lucas Archives). On its board of administrators are the guy film-makers Guillermo del Toro and Steven Spielberg, Arne Duncan (former US secretary of schooling beneath Barack Obama) in addition to the president emeritus of the Area Museum of Pure Historical past in Chicago and Michael Govan, the chief government and director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork—whose personal huge constructing undertaking is scheduled to open subsequent spring.
