‘I’m used to doing the impossible’: George Lucas unveils new LA museum – what’s its story? — SkimNews
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- Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens September 22 in Los Angeles, eight years after groundbreaking and after failed attempts to site it in San Francisco and Chicago.
- George Lucas and co-founder Mellody Hobson combined their art collections for the 100,000-square-foot museum, which displays works by Judy Baca, Norman Rockwell, Diego Rivera, and Banksy alongside the Cowardly Lion costume and Asterix and Garfield drawings.
- Architect Ma Yansong designed the spaceship-like structure but told media he was inspired by tree canopies and clouds, not Star Wars — though the round glass elevators do nothing to dispel that association.
- The galleries are sorted into an eclectic mix of categories — by medium (comics, children's stories, manga), theme (community, childhood, civic life), single artists (NC Wyeth, Jessie Willcox Smith, Maxfield Parrish), and genre (science fiction, fantasy, adventure).
- The museum deliberately omits lengthy wall text — visitors can scan QR codes for brief context — because curators wanted "individual encounters" with art rather than a "heavily mediated" experience, said senior curator Ryan Linkof.
- Lucas and Hobson frame the institution as elevating illustrators and comic artists who don't receive the same institutional respect as fine artists; CEO Tracey Bates called the museum "the People's Art" and labeled the Sistine Chapel "God's first comic book."
Why it matters: The museum adds 100,000 square feet of gallery space to LA's Exposition Park near USC, Lucas's alma mater, and stakes a deliberate claim that Norman Rockwell, comic-book artists, and muralists belong in the same institutional conversation as the Sistine Chapel. For the illustrators and comic artists featured, it offers rare permanent-collection validation in a building purpose-built for narrative art.
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