Lucas Unveils Spaceship-Shaped Narrative Art Museum in LA — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens September 22 in Los Angeles after breaking ground in 2018, following failed attempts to build the project in San Francisco and Chicago, with Lucas calling the 100,000-sq-ft institution the work that "almost broke my will."
- George Lucas and co-founder Mellody Hobson are positioning the museum as a home for what Lucas calls "People's Art" — illustrators, comic artists, and muralists who, as CEO Tracey Bates noted, "don't receive the same institutional respect" given to traditional fine artists.
- Architect Ma Yansong designed the flying-saucer-shaped building, inspired by "tree canopies and clouds" rather than Star Wars, towering over Lucas's alma mater USC with a plaza featuring an oculus that frames the sky.
- Senior curator Ryan Linkof explained the museum deliberately omits lengthy wall descriptions, opting for a "non-heavily mediated experience" where visitors scan works with their phones for context — a contrast to the dense label-text model of most major museums.
- The collection pairs Judy Baca, Norman Rockwell, Diego Rivera, and Banksy with the Cowardly Lion costume from The Wizard of Oz, Asterix and Garfield drawings, John Romita Jr's Spider-Man panels, and a backlit reproduction of the Sistine Chapel ceiling — which the museum calls "God's first comic book."
- The mural room anchors the museum's politically charged wing with Judith Baca's LA River mural, extracted Banksy wall works, and JR's Kikito installation depicting a child peering over the US-Mexico border wall.
- Galleries are sorted by an idiosyncratic mix of criteria — medium (comics, manga, children's stories), theme (community, childhood, civic life), individual artist, and genre — with a Star Wars transportation exhibit offering "surprise nods" to Lucas's own films.
Why it matters: Lucas and Hobson are placing John Romita Jr's Spider-Man panels and Maurice Sendak originals in the same institution as a Sistine Chapel reproduction across 100,000 sq ft of gallery space — a significant institutional validation for illustrators and comic artists long excluded from major museums. The September 22 opening in LA, after two failed attempts in San Francisco and Chicago, makes the city a permanent home for the founders' argument that narrative art is the connective tissue of human belief.
Ask SkimNews
