The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art closes out a week of member preview days today, the last stretch of a soft launch ahead of a public opening on Sept. 22 — the finish line of a saga that has run 16 years, three cities and roughly $1 billion of George Lucas's own money.
The 300,000-square-foot building in Los Angeles's Exposition Park holds more than 100,000 square feet of galleries — over 30 in all — spread across a 13-acre campus that also includes newly landscaped public parkland. More than 1,300 objects from Lucas's five-decade personal collection are on view at opening, spanning what the museum calls the history of visual storytelling, from illustration and comic art to film: works by Norman Rockwell and Frida Kahlo sit alongside pieces from Lucas's own archive of "Star Wars" production material.
Sixteen Years, Three Cities
Lucas first proposed the museum in 2010. A bid to build it on San Francisco's Presidio parkland fell through, and a subsequent plan for Chicago's lakefront collapsed after the nonprofit Friends of the Parks sued, arguing the project would effectively privatize public land. Los Angeles offered Exposition Park instead. "The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art was created to honor humanity's stories and the artists who illustrate them," Lucas said in the museum's opening announcement. His wife and museum co-founder, Mellody Hobson, framed the ambition more bluntly: "We wanted a museum unlike any other — one that brings people from every walk of life through the same doors."
The building itself, designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, curves around the park in a single sculpted form the architect has described as merging "like a natural feature of the landscape." Critics have been considerably less settled on what's inside it. Christopher Knight branded the project a "vanity museum" in the Los Angeles Times back in 2017, and the label has stuck through years of delay; a recent ARTnews review argued the institution "doesn't have a narrative" and functions more like a personal trove than a museum with a curatorial point of view. Others have been more forgiving: the Los Angeles Times' Mary McNamara called the museum "gutsy" and "defiant," predicting simply that "critics will roar."
A neighborhood preview day for local residents and community groups follows on Sept. 13, ahead of a Sept. 19 opening-night gala co-chaired by Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, Greta Gerwig and Guillermo del Toro, among others. General tickets for visits between Sept. 22 and Feb. 28 went on sale this month at $25 for adults, $21 for seniors, and free for visitors 17 and under, through the museum's website.
