Lucas Museum of Narrative Art reveals inaugural exhibition lineup – The Art Newspaper

When the Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork lastly opens in Los Angeles on 22 September, guests will likely be handled to a collection of 18 thematic exhibitions curated by George Lucas, the Star Wars film-maker who based the museum together with his spouse Mellody Hobson. The inaugural lineup of reveals, revealed by the museum on Thursday (30 April), affords a fuller image of the establishment’s assortment and the way the idea of “narrative artwork” will manifest on its partitions.

The exhibitions will convey collectively greater than 1,200 objects put in throughout greater than 30 galleries spanning round 100,000 sq. ft. A few of the exhibitions will likely be dedicated to particular media, disciplines and genres of artwork like pictures, structure, cinema and tales of the American West, whereas others tackle specific narrative codecs or subcultural classes like kids’s tales, manga and anime, and comics and graphic novels. Nonetheless different reveals will likely be broadly thematic, like Historical past, On a regular basis life (additional damaged down into matters like “Group”, “Love”, “Motherhood” and “Sports activities”) and Narrative types (together with subsections on journey, fantasy, romance and science-fiction).

Lucas’s inaugural programme provides a way of the gathering’s greatest strengths as there will likely be six exhibitions dedicated to particular person American artists: the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), the science fiction and fantasy artist Frank Frazetta (1928-2010), the illustrator and kids’s guide artist Jessie Willcox Smith (1863-1935), the painter and illustrator Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966), the favored artist and illustrator Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) and the painter and illustrator N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945).

A few of the medium-specific exhibitions can even showcase the museum’s holdings of canonical and modern artwork. The present Murals, as an illustration, will embody large-scale works by the Mexican Modernist Diego Rivera, the Los Angeles-based activist artist Judith F. Baca and the favored French photo-muralist JR, amongst others. The exhibition Images will embody pictures by Dorothea Lange, Robert Capa, Gordon Parks and Alfred Eisenstaedt, amongst others.

The inaugural lineup of exhibitions will supply only a style of the Lucas Museum’s assortment, which now totals greater than 40,000 works. It consists of the Separate Cinema Archive, a set of supplies documenting the historical past of African American movie, in addition to the Lucas Archives of costumes, props, fashions and artwork associated to its co-founders’ movies. Lucas has been main the museum’s curatorial programme for the reason that museum’s director and chief govt Sandra Jackson-Dumont left her publish in February 2025. In Could 2025, the museum laid off 14% of its full-time employees and reduce seven part-time roles.

First introduced in 2013, the Lucas Museum was initially attributable to be in-built San Francisco (close to Lucas’s longtime dwelling base in Marin County) then Chicago (Hobson’s hometown) and in the end Los Angeles. In that point its price range has grown from round $700m to a reported $1bn. Now its campus in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park is within the closing levels of building, with the outside of its futuristic constructing by Ma Yansong of the structure agency Mad basically full and the encircling inexperienced areas on its 11-acre campus, designed by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA, coming to life.

The Lucas Museum would be the third main artwork establishment building undertaking to open in Los Angeles this yr, following the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork’s new $724m David Geffen Galleries—which, paradoxically, opens to the general public on “Star Wars Day”, 4 Could—and the artificial-intelligence artwork area Dataland, from the studio of artist Refik Anadol, which is able to open on 20 June.