Lucas Museum Opens in Los Angeles: George Lucas's $1B Art Debut

After more than a decade of false starts and two city changes, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened its doors to the public on September 22 in Los Angeles' Exposition Park. The project, first pitched in 2013, arrives with a budget that climbed from around $700 million to a reported $1 billion.

Co-founded by filmmaker George Lucas and business executive Mellody Hobson, the Lucas Museum pitches itself as the first major museum devoted entirely to visual storytelling. That mission sounds abstract until you walk through the collection: more than 40,000 works spanning comic books, illustration, film artifacts, murals, photography, and traditional fine art, organized around themes like love, work, adventure, and sports. Jack Kirby and R. Crumb hang in the same building as Frida Kahlo and John Singer Sargent, which is exactly the argument the Lucas Museum is making.

Thirteen years of false starts

The Lucas Museum's origin story has become almost as famous as its collection. Lucas first proposed the museum for San Francisco, then moved the project to Chicago, where a lakefront site drew opposition and the plan collapsed. Los Angeles won the bid in 2017, and construction in Exposition Park proceeded through years of pandemic-era delays. Lucas has said the idea was conceived 17 years ago, and he told the Associated Press at a media preview that the project nearly broke him, appearing in a T-shirt that read "Dedicated to the people's art."

The building itself is part of the spectacle. Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects with Stantec, the 300,000-square-foot structure looks like a cloud or spacecraft hovering above a new 13-acre park. Inside, visitors get more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space across 30-plus rooms, two drop-in movie theaters, a free research library, and a rooftop restaurant named the Skywalker Grill. Yansong has said he wanted the building to feel as light as a dream, folded into Exposition Park's landscape as a natural feature.

Comics and blockbusters get the museum treatment

What sets the Lucas Museum apart from every other big-ticket art institution is its refusal to rank its holdings. The traditional museum hierarchy puts oil paintings at the top and everything else somewhere below; this collection treats a Golden Age comic book page and a Hollywood matte painting as worthy of the same wall as a canonical 19th-century portrait. Lucas calls the place a "temple to the people's art," and the Associated Press reports that Star Wars itself occupies only about 7 percent of the museum, according to CEO Tracey Bates. The opening exhibit, "Star Wars in Motion," shows production versions of Luke Skywalker's landspeeder and speeder bikes from Return of the Jedi, while a bright yellow Naboo N-1 Starfighter from The Phantom Menace hangs in the lobby of the public research library, USA Today reports.

For a generation that grew up on Marvel movies and manga, that argument lands differently than it would have twenty years ago. Gen Z collectors and creators already treat illustration and comics as serious art, and the Lucas Museum is betting they will show up in person to see that conviction made concrete. Film lovers have plenty to chew on this season anyway, from the record-breaking summer box office to fall releases like the Driver-Johansson mob drama Paper Tiger.

Hobson, who is president and co-CEO of Ariel Investments and the former chair of Starbucks, said in a statement on the museum's website that the couple wanted a museum unlike any other, one that brings people from every walk of life through the same doors. The collection holds many different kinds of stories, she said, so that visitors can see themselves and the world they know reflected back. The Lucas Museum has also introduced an LM37 neighborhood pass program offering free ongoing admission for local residents. According to Black Enterprise, the couple's cultural work includes an effort to preserve the historic EBONY and JET archives and a $10 million donation to Spelman College supporting arts education.

An A-list opening night

The opening-night celebration matched the scale of the build. Black Enterprise reported that Oprah Winfrey, Queen Latifah, Samuel L. Jackson, Tyler Perry, Spike Lee, Michael B. Jordan, and Magic Johnson were among the guests. Winfrey and Jackson narrated a drone show featuring images from the museum's collection before Will.i.am performed, per the same report.

Whether the Lucas Museum becomes a lasting cultural force or an expensive monument to one man's taste will take years to judge. For now, Los Angeles has a new landmark, comic art has a new flagship address, and the old line between high art and pop culture just got harder to defend. As the Art Newspaper reported, the collection's thematic groupings deliberately mix ancient artifacts with blockbuster cinema, a curatorial bet that storytelling itself is the thread worth following.