Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, private museum in Los Angeles cofounded by filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, co-CEO of Ariel Investments, one of the largest Black-owned mutual fund firms in the United States. The couple conceived of the museum not only as a space to house the archives from Lucas’s movies and their large collection of figurative paintings, comic strips, posters, and illustrations but also as a place where visitors can find connections between such disparate media.

The space

Designed by Ma Yansong, principal architect and founder of MAD Architects, the 300,000-square-foot (about 28,000-square-meter) museum has been compared to a spaceship floating above the landscape. The institution boasts a sustainable design, featuring solar panels, a rooftop garden, and rainwater capture for irrigation across its 13-acre (5.26-hectare) campus of landscaped gardens. The outdoor space was designed by Mia Lehrer, founder and president of the landscape architecture firm Studio-MLA, and features native and drought-tolerant plants.

Within the five-story building, art is displayed across 35 galleries arranged by such themes as family, love, fantasy, work, play, community, childhood, adventure, and sports. The galleries draw from a collection of more than 40,000 works that Lucas began acquiring while in college. For more than 50 years he continued to grow the collection, aided by Hobson after their marriage in 2013. In addition to the art collection, the Lucas Museum houses the film archives that Lucas retained after the 2012 sale of his production company to the Walt Disney Company, including models, props, vehicles, costumes, and concept art from the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises and from films such as Willow (1988). The museum also includes two theaters, a library, dining establishments, and a shop.

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The collection

The Lucas Museum describes narrative art broadly as visual art that tells stories or communicates the beliefs, values, and myths through which people understand themselves and their societies. Its collection deliberately defies conventional boundaries between fine and popular art, placing painting and sculpture alongside illustration, comics, photography, and cinema. Among the art on display are paintings by Norman Rockwell, Charles White, Frida Kahlo, Jacob Lawrence, and Utagawa Kuniyoshi; illustrations by Maxfield Parrish and Beatrix Potter; comics by Frank Frazetta, Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, and R. Crumb; and photographs by Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

The history

The creation of the Lucas Museum was marked by several years of repeated challenges, relocations, disagreements, and delays. Lucas originally proposed a privately funded museum in 2010, hoping to build in the Presidio, a well-known San Francisco park. Those plans, however, failed to materialize. He then set his sights on lakefront property in Chicago, where a lawsuit over the use of parkland ultimately led him to build in Exposition Park in Los Angeles. The groundbreaking occurred in 2018, though construction was delayed by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and by subsequent supply chain issues. After years of anticipation, the museum finally opened in 2026.