George Lucas unveiled his Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles on September 2, ahead of the institution’s official opening on September 22. The 300,000-square-foot museum stands on an 11-acre campus in Exposition Park and marks the completion of a project that took nearly two decades and experienced years of delays.
Lucas built the museum with his wife and business partner, Mellody Hobson. The project cost more than a billion dollars. At the unveiling, Lucas said: “I'm used to doing the impossible. This one almost broke my will.”
The museum is intended as a home for narrative art across fine art, popular culture and film. Lucas described the complex as the “people's temple of art”. Its permanent collection contains more than 40,000 works, while opening exhibitions will place more than 1,200 objects across over 30 galleries.
The site was previously a parking lot and is near Lucas’s alma mater, the University of Southern California. It adds a major new cultural institution to Exposition Park, with 35 galleries occupying approximately 100,000 square feet.
Ma Yansong designed the elevated, curved building, which has a green roof intended to blend into the surrounding landscape. The campus also includes two theaters, a library, a café, a rooftop restaurant, retail areas and spaces for educational programs.
The inaugural exhibitions bring together artists and forms that are often shown separately. They will include work by Norman Rockwell, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Jack Kirby, Beatrix Potter, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks. Galleries are organised around subjects including childhood, family, love, work, sports, fantasy and adventure.
Lucas’s film work will have a prominent place in the museum. A yellow Naboo N-1 starfighter from Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) greets visitors at the entrance. The Lucas Archives will contain materials from the first six Star Wars films and the first four Indiana Jones movies.
The collection’s combination of works associated with museums and works rooted in illustration, comics and film reflects Lucas’s stated interest in narrative. The opening displays place those forms in thematic galleries, rather than separating them by medium or period.
Adult admission will cost $25. Tickets for visitors 65 and older will cost $21. Children 17 and younger, active-duty military members and museum members will enter free. Every visitor, including children and members, must reserve a timed-entry ticket in advance.
The museum’s opening follows a long construction process whose specific causes of delay and cost overruns have not been detailed beyond the project’s general complexity. Details of future exhibitions, visitor capacity, operational funding and the educational programme have also not been set out. For now, the September 22 opening will introduce more than 1,200 objects from a collection intended to span art, popular imagery and Lucas’s own film archives.
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