Wave Staff Report
EXPOSITION PARK — The Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts is celebrating its opening with a series of events leading to its official opening Sept. 22. Member preview days, which began Sept. 5, conclude Sept. 11, followed by a neighborhood preview day Sept. 13 for community partners, local business owners, civic leaders, students and residents of the museum’s 90037 zip code.
On Sept. 19, the museum will inaugurate the building with an opening night celebration co-chaired by Julie Bell, Tom Cruise, Greta Gerwig, Jensen Huang, Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro and Pharrell Williams. The evening will bring together leaders from across art, cinema and philanthropy to mark the opening of the museum.
The museum is a first-of-its-kind institution dedicated to showcasing the universal tradition of storytelling through images. 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, shape belief and help people see themselves in one another. The soaring 300,000-square-foot building, designed by Ma Yansong, houses more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space across 30-plus galleries.
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.
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 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,” Lucas said. “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.”
“We wanted a museum unlike any other — one that brings people from every walk of life through the same doors,” Hobson said. “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.”
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 reproductions of immovable artworks, architecture, and archeological sites from around the world, trace the stories across tens of thousands of years.
Many of the reproductions on the first floor were created by the museum using 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 three-dimensional 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 those galleries range from Vincent van Gogh, George Bellows and Jacob Lawrence to Beatrix Potter, Charles White and Ernie Barnes.
“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,” Museum CEO Tracey Bates said. “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.”
