True to its title, 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 mission was first introduced, its founders—the Star Wars film-maker George Lucas and his spouse, Mellody Hobson, the president and co-chief govt of Ariel Investments—have set a gap date: 22 September 2026.
Within the 13 years between the mission’s announcement and grand opening, it’s going to have modified cities twice—from San Francisco to Chicago to Los Angeles—grown in finances 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 almost 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 type rising from two bases, will home 100,000 sq. ft of exhibition house throughout 35 galleries. They’ll characteristic thematic groupings round matters 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 vital 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 pictures—by Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson and others—and contains the Separate Cinema Archive, a set of supplies documenting the historical past of African American movie. It additional options extra in style artwork that linked with vast 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 stay with on daily basis. For that purpose, this artwork belongs to everybody,” Hobson stated in an announcement. “Our hope is that as individuals transfer via the galleries, they’ll see themselves, and their humanity, mirrored again.”
Lucas will see his personal profession mirrored again within the galleries as nicely, because the establishment will home the Lucas Archives—together with costumes, props, fashions and artwork associated to his movies.
Artist unknown, Polychrome Aid 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 govt Sandra Jackson-Dumont final February, Lucas has been “chargeable for content material course”. In Might, the museum laid off 14% of its full-time workers and reduce seven part-time roles.
The museum’s curatorial management contains 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 man film-makers Guillermo del Toro and Steven Spielberg, Arne Duncan (former US secretary of training underneath Barack Obama) in addition to the president emeritus of the Discipline Museum of Pure Historical past in Chicago and Michael Govan, the chief govt and director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork—whose personal monumental constructing mission is scheduled to open subsequent spring.
