George Lucas’s museum of visual storytelling opens in Los Angeles after 17 years

Comic books, Renaissance paintings, works by Norman Rockwell and Star Wars concept art now hang under one roof in Los Angeles. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, founded by the filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, opened to the public on 22 September 2026 in Exposition Park, in the south of the city.

The museum is devoted to what its founders call narrative art: images that tell stories, whatever their medium or status. In its opening announcement the museum said that illustration, comics and cinema “have not always received the same recognition as painting, sculpture, and photography”, and that it would present art and popular culture side by side.

What is inside

The building covers about 300,000 square feet (approximately 28,000 square metres), with more than 100,000 square feet of exhibition space in over 30 galleries. According to the museum, the inaugural displays draw more than 1,300 works from its collection. Artists named in its announcement range from Artemisia Gentileschi and Vincent van Gogh to Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, N.C. Wyeth, Frank Frazetta and Robert Crumb. A fifth-floor mural gallery includes Judith F. Baca’s The History of California and works by JR and Banksy.

The first-floor introductory gallery, on heroes, myths and the sacred, mixes pieces from the collection with reproductions of immovable artworks, buildings and archaeological sites, made with partners including the Vatican Museums, the Louvre, Spain’s Altamira museum and Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.

Film material comes from the Lucas Archives, which cover 1971 to 2012, and an opening display is devoted to the vehicles of the first six Star Wars films. Hobson told the US broadcaster ABC News that Star Wars material makes up only seven percent of the museum. There are two cinemas with continuous screenings, a free research library holding more than 30,000 comic books, and a restaurant.

The building

The museum was designed by the architect Ma Yansong of the practice MAD, working with the firm Stantec. The museum describes a central arch spanning 185 feet and a skin of more than 1,200 curved fibreglass-reinforced polymer panels. Ma said in the museum’s announcement that he wanted a building “as light and free as a cloud, or a dream”. At the opening-night event on 19 September, ABC News reported, he remarked: “Someone said this is a spaceship, but the idea was nature.”

Around it, a 13-acre campus has replaced a former asphalt car park with a public park and gardens by the landscape architect Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA, planted with more than 300 trees and set with ten large outdoor sculptures. Entry to the park is free.

A long road to opening

Lucas told ABC News that the project had taken 17 years, from the search for a city to the finished building. The museum was first planned for Chicago; the Los Angeles public radio station LAist reported that the plan was dropped in 2015 after a dispute over the site and a lawsuit by a parks preservation group. ABC News said San Francisco had also been considered. Exposition Park was chosen in 2017.

Museum officials told LAist that hundreds of schools lie near the site and that more than 500,000 people live within three miles of the park, which also holds other museums and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Residents of the museum’s own postal code are admitted free, ABC News reported. General admission is by timed ticket at US$25 for adults, with free entry for visitors aged 17 and under, according to LAist.

“It is our gift to you because it belongs to all of us,” Hobson said at a press event before the doors opened, LAist reported. Lucas, speaking at the opening, defended the museum’s broad definition of its subject. “You can’t say this is art and this is not art,” he said, according to ABC News. “Art is in the eye of the beholder.”

Among the first visitors LAist interviewed was Shiloh Williams, a Los Angeles artist, who said he was “incredibly impressed” by the breadth of the collection.