Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is an upcoming museum in Los Angeles, California, dedicated to the visual storytelling arts. Founded by filmmaker George Lucas and businesswoman Mellody Hobson, the institution explores how narrative art shapes society by expressing beliefs, communicating values, and capturing the human experience. The museum defines narrative art broadly, encompassing painting, photography, sculpture, illustration, comic art, performance, and video. It is under construction in Exposition Park and is expected to open on September 22, 2026.

The museum was conceived by Lucas to share his personal collection of narrative art, with an inception date of 2014. Originally named the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum, the project was first proposed for Crissy Field in San Francisco. After four years of unsuccessful negotiations with The Presidio Trust, Lucas shifted focus to Chicago in 2014, drawn by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and a proposed lakefront site leased from the Chicago Park District for one dollar a year. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and Youngstown, Ohio, also made bids. In Chicago, the project faced significant opposition from preservation group Friends of the Parks, which filed a federal suit arguing the development violated public trust laws on the lakefront. Following prolonged litigation and criticism over the building's scale, Lucas abandoned the Chicago plan and selected Los Angeles in 2017, citing the city's connection to the film industry. Construction began in 2018. The project experienced multiple delays, pushing the opening from 2021 to 2025, and finally to 2026, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and global supply-chain issues. Leadership has also seen transitions: the first president, Don Bacigalupi, stepped down in early 2019. Sandra Jackson-Dumont served as director and CEO from October 2019 until March 2025, followed by Jim Gianopulos as interim CEO. Chief curator Pilar Tompkins Rivas departed in December 2025.

The museum's permanent collection comprises more than 40,000 works that trace the evolution of image-based storytelling. Holdings span ancient sculptures, Renaissance paintings, and modern photography, but the institution maintains deep and extensive holdings in forms often underrepresented in traditional museums, such as illustration, comic art, and film artifacts. The collection features 20th- and 21st-century murals, children's book and science fiction illustrations, and a vast array of cinematic memorabilia. Inaugural exhibitions will be organized thematically around human experiences such as love, family, community, work, school, sports, and adventure, alongside galleries dedicated to individual artists and specific genres like fantasy, romance, and western stories.

The collection includes works by artists such as Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Lange, Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish, N.C. Wyeth, Thomas Hart Benton, and Jessie Willcox Smith. Comic and graphic storytelling holdings feature Jack Kirby, Frank Miller, Moebius, Alison Bechdel, and Alex Raymond's first character drawing for the 1934 Flash Gordon comics. The museum also holds original Peanuts sketches by Charles Schulz from the 1950s and 1960s. Significant acquisitions include the archive for Judy Baca's half-mile-long mural The History of California, known as the Great Wall of Los Angeles, and Robert Colescott's painting George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware River: Page from an American History Textbook, both acquired in 2021. In 2019, the museum acquired the Separate Cinema Archive, roughly 37,000 objects tracking African American cinema history from 1904, featuring figures like Dorothy Dandridge and Paul Robeson. The foundational Lucas Archives, donated by Lucas in 2013, encompasses film props, costumes, artwork, and artifacts from Lucasfilm productions from the 1970s to 2012, including materials from Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Willow.

The museum occupies an 11-acre campus in Exposition Park, adjacent to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The 300,000-square-foot, five-story building was designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects using parametric modeling to create a futuristic, organic structure devoid of right angles, with a sweeping carapace resembling an alien craft. The interior features rich wood paneling, grand twisting staircases, glass elevators resembling pneumatic tubes, 35 galleries containing 100,000 square feet of exhibition space, a three-level research library, two theaters, a cafe, and a fifth-floor restaurant operated by Rhubarb Hospitality Collection. The surrounding landscape, designed by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA, transforms a former asphalt lot into a park with rolling hills, native plants, and over 200 newly planted trees. The park doubles as the roof for two buried parking garages and includes a large fountain integrated into the museum's climate-control system. A garden planted on top of the museum will also be accessible to visitors.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is located in Exposition Park in Los Angeles, California, and is scheduled to open on September 22, 2026. The 11-acre park surrounding the museum will be open to the public from sunrise to sunset, including visitors without museum tickets. The institution emphasizes its role as a museum of the people's art, aiming to reflect shared humanity and common beliefs through its accessible visual storytelling. Despite recent staffing challenges, including layoffs affecting education and public programming teams, the museum maintains that education remains a central pillar of its mission, with classrooms remaining part of the building design.