The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened its doors to the public on Sept. 22 in Los Angeles's Exposition Park, closing out a 17-year, roughly $1 billion undertaking by "Star Wars" creator George Lucas and his wife, the investor Mellody Hobson. One week later, the debate the museum's founders invited is well underway: what, exactly, counts as "narrative art," and does a genre built around that question hold together as a museum?
The 300,000-square-foot building, designed by Ma Yansong of the firm MAD Architects, houses more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space across upwards of 30 galleries on an 11-acre campus. Its collection ranges from prehistoric cave-painting reproductions and illustration by Norman Rockwell and Jack Kirby to paintings by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, alongside film material from the Lucas Archives. Star Wars-related artifacts and props, long assumed to be the collection's centerpiece, make up only about 7% of the holdings.
A Founder's Long-Delayed Vision
The museum's path to opening was unusually long even by museum-building standards: originally proposed for Chicago, then San Francisco, before settling on Los Angeles, the project took 17 years from conception to completion and weathered years of permitting fights, redesigns and construction delays. Lucas, who has spent much of the past two decades assembling the collection privately, has described the guiding idea as deliberately expansive rather than art-historical, built around the premise that storytelling through images deserves the same institutional weight as painting movements or period rooms.
The museum joins an already dense cluster of Los Angeles art institutions within a few miles of one another, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, intensifying competition for both visitors and philanthropic dollars in a city that has poured billions into museum-building over the past decade. Unlike those neighbors, the Lucas Museum was built and funded almost entirely through the founders' personal wealth rather than public bonds or a broad donor base, a structure that has given Lucas and Hobson unusual latitude over what the museum collects and how it is displayed.
"The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art was created to honor humanity's stories and the artists who illustrate them."
George Lucas, founder
The public opening followed a star-studded gala on Sept. 19 that featured performances by Pharrell Williams and the Black Eyed Peas, with celebrity co-chairs including Steven Spielberg, Greta Gerwig and Tom Cruise. Attendees reported by entertainment press included Robert De Niro, Kim Kardashian, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, former Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. The museum also built in a deliberately local gesture: residents who share the museum's zip code, an area Hobson has noted is largely Hispanic and Black, receive free admission. "It's their building," Hobson has said of the policy.
Critics Split Over the Verdict
Reviews since the opening have divided sharply over whether "narrative art" is a coherent curatorial premise or a marketing umbrella. Los Angeles Times culture critic Mary McNamara embraced the museum's refusal to sort work "by themes rather than genre, period, place or, and this is important, prestige," calling the institution gutsy and defiant.
"Critics will roar, but the Lucas Museum is a win for 'the people's art.'"
Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times
Others have been considerably less convinced. Writing in ARTnews, critic Maximiliano Durón faulted the museum for offering visitors little curatorial framing, arguing that without clearer didactics, he "left the Lucas without a clear sense of how the museum is positioning itself." The split echoes a long-running argument in the art world, dating back to comments from former Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight, who once dismissed "narrative art" itself as an invented category.
For now, the museum says the disagreement is part of the point: its stated aim is to treat illustration, comics and popular visual storytelling as seriously as work that has traditionally hung in fine-art institutions, rather than to resolve the argument about where the line between them sits. The Lucas Museum has not announced when its full slate of rotating exhibitions will be unveiled, but curators have signaled that a program built around themes of memory, migration and childhood will roll out over the coming year — ensuring the debate over its premise is likely to continue well past opening week.
