By Gina Yarbrough
Los Angeles, CA–The highly anticipated Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is set to open to the public on September 22 in Los Angeles, introducing a first-of-its-kind institution dedicated to exploring the universal tradition of storytelling through images.
The museum will showcase a diverse collection of art and visual works that demonstrate how people across cultures and generations have used images to tell stories, share ideas and connect with one another.
Founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, the museum traces visual storytelling across cultures and centuries — from prehistoric cave paintings to illustration, comics, cinema, and murals—celebrating how stories connect us, shape belief, and help us see ourselves in one another.
The soaring 300,000-square-foot building, designed by Ma Yansong of MAD with Stantec, houses more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space across 30-plus galleries.
Located in historic Exposition Park, the museum’s collection spans a wide range of eras and mediums of visual storytelling—from Artemisia Gentileschi and Norman Rockwell to Frida Kahlo, Robert Colescott, Frank Frazetta, and Robert Crumb—alongside film materials that include the complete Lucas Archives (1971–2012). Contemporary vehicles of storytelling such as illustration, comics, and cinema have not always received the same recognition as painting, sculpture, and photography. The Lucas Museum gives them equal standing, presenting art and popular culture side by side as part of one continuous visual tradition. The museum also houses a free research library and the destination restaurant Skywalker Grill. Included in the 13-acre campus are a new park and gardens designed by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA, featuring sculptures and new public green space for South Los Angeles.
“The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art was created to honor humanity’s stories and the artists who illustrate them. The artists in this collection didn’t just create images, they connected our modern imaginations with our ancient emotions—with common beliefs creating community. Their work spans genres, media, and time. They deserve to be in a museum,” George Lucas said.
“We wanted a museum unlike any other–one that brings people from every walk of life through the same doors. That’s why this collection holds so many different kinds of stories: so that more people can walk in and, somewhere in these galleries, see themselves–and the world they know—reflected back. That kind of recognition is what we built this place to offer,” Mellody Hobson said.
Unfolding through 100,000 square feet of space spread across more than 30 galleries, the Museum’s inaugural exhibitions trace the history of narrative art through more than 1,300 works from the museum’s collection.
The story begins on the first floor in The History of Narrative Art: Heroes • Myths • The Sacred, an introduction exploring how visual storytelling has produced mythologies that inspired devotion, forged communities, and shaped societies. Signature pieces from the Museum’s collection, joined in this gallery by stunningly faithful reproductions of immovable artworks, architecture, and archeological sites from around the world, trace these stories across tens of thousands of years. Taken together, these works show that visual storytelling is not only a universal human instinct but also a tool used by church and state alike to communicate values, assert power, and define belief.
Many of the reproductions on the first floor were created by the Museum using innovative technology in collaboration with institutions, sites and governments around the world. Examples include the Vatican Museums for the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Louvre for the Winged Human-Headed Bulls from the Palace of Sargon II, the National Museum and Research Center of Altamira in Spain for ancient cave paintings, and Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia for the Aztec Sun Stone. High-resolution images and 3-D scans of the original objects captured by the Museum to create the reproductions have been donated to the collaborating partners. The result is a unique, single gallery encounter with works that visitors could otherwise see only by traveling around the globe.
Expansive galleries on the museum’s fourth and fifth floors present works from the collection in installations dedicated to themes, artistic mediums, and the achievements of individual artists. Thematic galleries explore myths of love, family, and community, across generations, as seen in classics of children’s literature, images of courtship and motherhood, scenes of labor, sport, and recreation, and illustrated tales of danger and daring. Artists represented in these galleries range from Vincent van Gogh, George Bellows, and Jacob Lawrence to Beatrix Potter, Charles White, and Ernie Barnes.
Exhibitions devoted to specific genres of storytelling–fantasy, romance, adventure–feature works by artists including George Méliès, Boris Vallejo, Julie Bell, and Ken Kelly. Exhibitions that showcase artistic mediums—comic books, manga, graphic novels, photography, and murals–include artists such as George Herriman, Charles Schulz, Jim Lee, Frank Miller, Takashi Murakami, Robert Capa, Gordon Parks, Diego Rivera, JR, and Judith F. Baca.
American artists who were among the giants of 20th-century illustration are honored in the inaugural exhibition with individual galleries. These artists include Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Jessie Willcox Smith, Maxfield Parrish, Frank Frazetta, and Thomas Hart Benton.
Drawing on the works in the Lucas Archives, the inaugural Cinema gallery installation will present a special exhibition titled Star Wars in Motion, focusing on the land vehicles seen in the first six films of George Lucas’s saga. On view will be concept designs, props, and costumes associated with the films’ high-speed racers, hulking transports, and flying vessels, from Luke’s Landspeeder in A New Hope (1977) to the first physical build of General Grevious’s Wheel Bike in Revenge of the Sith (2005).
Paying tribute to architect Ma Yansong as a narrative artist in his own right, the inaugural exhibitions will also include an installation of drawings, renderings, and photographs of his visionary work for MAD, including the Lucas Museum and other projects.
A gallery on the fifth floor dedicated to large-scale, monumental storytelling in public contexts highlights how murals reflect history, identity, and shared social memory. Highlights include works from the extensive archive of Chicana muralist Judith F. Baca’s famous half-mile-long mural, The History of California (commonly known as The Great Wall of Los Angeles). Additional highlights include large-scale works and studies by renowned muralists such as Mexican modernist Diego Rivera and French contemporary street artist JR, as well as iconic pieces alongside never before seen acquisitions direct from the studio of renowned street artist Banksy.
“I am deeply grateful to George Lucas and Mellody Hobson for giving me the opportunity to create a building that will faithfully serve the visitors and the art while being as light and free as a cloud, or a dream. Designed with emotional architecture spaces, so that it is fluid in every part, and merged like a natural feature of the landscape into Exposition Park, the building invites everyone to participate in a journey of discovery and become part of the story of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art,” said Ma Yansong, architect and founder, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.
The Lucas Museum’s inaugural film program celebrates cinema as both a powerful vehicle for narrative and a groundbreaking technology for creating moving visual experiences. This dual nature is brought to life across two dedicated, state-of-the-art theaters: the Robert Flaherty Theater and the Slavko Vorkapich Theater. Designed as continuous, drop-in gallery experiences, the programs in the theaters allow visitors to come and go at their leisure, with films ranging from a few minutes to 90 minutes in length.
The Robert Flaherty Theater honors the documentary filmmaking pioneer (1884–1951) by exploring cinema’s power to capture reality in all its richness. It features films highlighting the deep history of narrative art as well as the creative processes of artists and storytellers featured across the museum’s inaugural exhibitions.
The Slavko Vorkapich Theater celebrates the magical mechanics of film—light, motion, sound, color, and editing. Named after the legendary experimental filmmaker who created groundbreaking montage sequences and special effects for dozens of Hollywood films from the 1920s through the 1940s, the venue pays homage to Vorkapich’s cinematic legacy and his tenure as Chair of the USC Department of Film (1948–1950)—the school co-founder George Lucas would later attend. Dedicated to exploring “the emotion of motion,” the theater features innovative short films from cinema’s very earliest years to the present.
“George Lucas and Mellody Hobson have an unshakeable faith in the power of visual storytelling to inspire not just individuals but entire societies, bringing people together around goals, beliefs, and values worth sharing. It’s incredibly rewarding to finally welcome the public through our doors. Every gallery, every program, every corner of this museum was built with our visitors in mind, and we can’t wait for people to experience it,” Lucas Museum of Narrative Art CEO Tracey Bates said.
