The long-awaited Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles has set its opening date for September 22, 2026.
The Lucas Museum has been in the works for over a decade. Its founders, filmmaker George Lucas and Ariel Investments co-CEO and president Mellody Hobson, first began exploring a location for the museum in 2013, with San Francisco and later Chicago as possible sites.
Eventually, they landed on Los Angeles, securing a site in Exposition Park in 2017, with the groundbreaking happening the following year. The construction of the building, designed by Ma Yansong of MAD, has been delayed several times. It was originally scheduled to open in 2021, which was then delayed to 2023 and again to 2025. In late 2024, the museum quietly pushed its opening back again to 2026, though it hadn’t released a target month or season until now.
The museum’s collection now numbers more than 40,000 objects and focuses on what Lucas and Hobson call “narrative art,” or anything that engages in visual storytelling from fine art to popular culture, like comic books and movie posters. The collection also includes the Lucas Archives, consisting of models, props, concept art, and costumes from Lucas’s films. Their voracious collecting for the museum has landed them a spot on each edition of ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list since 2020.
The collection includes a range of artists, including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Jacob Lawrence, Mary Cassatt, Charles White, Judith F. Baca, Ernie Barnes, N. C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, and Gordon Parks. The Lucas has also purchased high-profile works, like Norman Rockwell’s Saying Grace (1951) from a Sotheby’s auction in 2013 for $46 million; Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barbershop (1950), which the Berkshire Museum in Massachusetts sold for an undisclosed price in 2018; and Robert Colescott’s iconic George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975) for $15.3 million at a Sotheby’s auction in 2021.
“This is a museum of the people’s art—the images are illustrations of beliefs we live with every day,” Hobson said in a statement. “For that reason, this art belongs to everyone. Our hope is that as people move through the galleries, they will see themselves, and their humanity, reflected back.”
In a statement, Lucas added, “Stories are mythology, and when illustrated, they help humans understand the mysteries of life.”
This year has also seen the Lucas Museum face several changes in terms of staffing. Its high-profile director and CEO Sandra Jackson-Dumont, who was recruited from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was chairman of education, stepped down from the role in February. At the time, the museum said Jackson Dumont’s role would be spilt with Lucas taking over the “content direction” of the institution and naming Jim Gianopulos, the former chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures, as interim CEO. (At the time, the museum said that a search for a permanent CEO was underway.) Then in May, the museum laid off 15 employees, or 14 percent of its full-time staff, which mostly affected its Learning & Engagement and Museum Services teams.
Prior to the announcement, the museum has been on a bit of a promotional tour, organizing panels at San Diego Comic-Con and New York Comic Con. (The two events are not related; the former is a nonprofit organization while the latter is a for-profit entity.) Lucas headlined the San Diego panel, which was moderated by Queen Latifah and featured director Guillermo del Toro and production designer Doug Chiang, while the New York one did not feature Lucas but instead JR, Boris Vallejo, Julie Bell, and Martin Scorcese, who served as moderator.
At the San Diego panel, Lucas said, “This museum is dedicated to the idea that stories, mythology, any kind of story that is written to affect people and to build community is extremely important to society and creating societies and creating community. Art illustrates that story, so this is sort of a temple to the people’s art.”
