George Lucas's long-promised temple to visual storytelling, comic art included, finally has an opening day.
After more than a decade of planning and false starts, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is on track to open in Los Angeles, with an expected debut date of September 22, 2026. Founded by filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, businesswoman Mellody Hobson, the institution is dedicated to all forms of visual storytelling, spanning painting, photography, sculpture, illustration, comic art, performance and video. It is under construction in Exposition Park, the cultural district in South Los Angeles that already houses several major museums.
The museum's collection reflects an unusually broad definition of narrative art. Planned holdings include works by artists as varied as Judy Baca, N.C. Wyeth, Carrie Mae Weems, Diego Rivera, Norman Rockwell, Frank Frazetta, Ralph McQuarrie, Jacob Lawrence, Kadir Nelson, Paul Cadmus, Yinka Shonibare and Jack Kirby. The inclusion of figures like Kirby, Frazetta and McQuarrie signals a deliberate embrace of comic art and illustration alongside fine art, a hierarchy the museum is designed to flatten.
Several acquisitions have already drawn attention. In 2021 the museum announced it had acquired the archive of materials related to Judy Baca's half-mile-long mural The History of California, popularly known as the Great Wall of Los Angeles. That same year it acquired Robert Colescott's painting George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware River: Page from an American History Textbook. The institution also gathered the Separate Cinema Archive in 2019, a roughly 37,000-object collection tracking the history of African American cinema from 1904 onward.
Lucas himself seeded the holdings from his own collection. To build out what the institution calls the Lucas Archives, he donated personal material including Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Peanuts props and memorabilia. That contribution ties the filmmaker's own cinematic legacy directly to the museum's mission of celebrating storytelling across media. It also reflects the personal nature of a project Lucas has pursued for years as a complement to his career behind the camera.
Getting to Los Angeles took a long and contentious search. The project was first conceived as the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum for San Francisco, on Crissy Field, but four years of unsuccessful negotiations with the Presidio Trust ended that plan. Lucas then turned to Chicago, drawn by the promise of lakefront land near Soldier Field, but that bid collapsed amid opposition from the preservation group Friends of the Parks, whose federal lawsuit and a 2015 ruling that the land was held in public trust ultimately stalled construction.
Los Angeles, whose leaders had offered land in Exposition Park adjacent to the University of Southern California, emerged as the destination, and Lucas announced the site on January 10, 2017. He cited the proximity of USC, his alma mater, along with the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, nearby museums and local schools in the South Los Angeles region. The choice rooted the museum in a dense civic and educational neighborhood.
The building itself is a statement. Designed by Ma Yansong of the Chinese firm MAD Architects, with Stantec as architect of record, the nearly 300,000-square-foot structure will rise across five levels and include 100,000 square feet of gallery space, a library, learning studios, two theaters, a restaurant, a cafe and an event space, set within 11 acres of new park land designed by Studio-MLA. The opening, originally set for 2021, was pushed repeatedly amid pandemic-related delays and leadership turnover, with the debut now planned for 2026.
Compiled from public records.
