George Lucas Museum Opens to Public Sept 22

George Lucas spent more than a decade building a museum for the kind of art that rarely gets one. On Tuesday, September 22, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens to the public in Los Angeles's Exposition Park, ending years of construction delays and giving the city its newest major cultural institution.

The Lucas Museum was co-founded by Lucas and his wife, businesswoman Mellody Hobson, who say its purpose is to honor illustrators and the images that illustrate written stories. The one-billion-dollar building, designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects with Stantec as executive architect, covers three hundred thousand square feet and is wrapped in about 1,500 hand-finished fiberglass panels. It has no hard corners. A sweeping public canopy lifts the five-story structure off the ground, shading parkland below and turning the underside of the building into one of its most photographed spaces.

Inside are 35 galleries with more than one hundred thousand square feet of exhibition space, two theaters, a free research library, a restaurant called Skywalker Grill, and the complete Lucas Archives, covering the filmmaker's work from 1971 to 2012. Outside, an 11-acre campus of gardens designed by landscape architect Mia Lehrer and Studio-MLA wraps around the building on land that used to be surface parking.

Admission costs $25 for adults and $21 for seniors, with free entry for visitors 17 and under. All entry is timed, and tickets are booked through lucasmuseum.org. Founding members got their first look starting September 5, and South Los Angeles neighbors were invited to a Community Preview Day on September 13. Residents of the 90037 zip code around the museum are eligible for the LM37 pass, which grants free admission for the holder plus a guest.

A collection built around illustrated stories

The Lucas Museum's permanent collection holds more than forty thousand works, and the range is the point: classical painting hangs in the same institution as illustration, comics, manga, children's book art, photography and murals. Among the names are Frida Kahlo, Norman Rockwell, Beatrix Potter, Jack Kirby, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Kadir Nelson and Banksy.

One inaugural gallery is devoted to murals, pairing three artists rarely mentioned in the same sentence: Diego Rivera, Judith F. Baca and the French photographer JR, whose 65-foot portrait of a toddler once looked out over a border fence. The room makes the museum's argument plainly, that a wheatpasted photograph and a fresco painted a century apart can speak the same visual language.

The collection also spans the history of comic art, from early newspaper strips such as Alex Raymond's 1934 "Flash Gordon" to the work of artists like Frank Frazetta. Photographs, children's illustrations and science fiction art sit alongside, all grouped around a single idea: that narrative images are what the museum's senior curator, Ryan Linkof, described during the pre-opening press ceremony as "art that illustrates stories."

Star Wars roots and wider ambitions

Lucas's own film legacy is on full display. The complete Lucas Archives bring models, props, costumes and concept art from his films into the museum, and one of the inaugural exhibitions is "Star Wars in Motion," drawn from the archives and focused on the first six Star Wars films. Luke's Landspeeder is in it, along with the first physical build of General Grievous's wheel bike.

At the pre-opening press ceremony on September 2, Lucas told reporters the museum honored the kinds of artists who illustrate stories that are already written, calling the opening a "big celebration" after the long road to get there, according to Reuters. Hobson has described the institution as "a museum by the people for the people," and said in a statement last year that the art in its galleries amounts to a museum of the people's art, because the images are illustrations of beliefs people live with every day.

The project was originally slated to open in 2021, but the pandemic pushed the timeline back by several years. Construction ran for about eight years beside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and the museum's arrival lands as Los Angeles prepares to host the 2028 Summer Olympics, adding a major stop to the cultural corridor around Exposition Park and the University of Southern California.

Reporting by Reuters also covered the September 2 press preview, where a limited group of visitors toured the campus for the first time. Smithsonian magazine first reported the museum's opening date when it was announced, and Get Lost notes the museum is clear it is not a Star Wars museum: the film archive is only one part of a collection that stretches from ancient sculpture to manga.