The People's Art Finally Gets a Building
For most of the last century, the argument against comics, illustration and film was not that they were bad. It was that they were popular. Painting and sculpture got the museums. Everything else got the drugstore spinner rack.
George Lucas has spent more than a decade and over a billion dollars of his own money arguing the opposite, and on Tuesday, September 22, the argument opens to the public. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, founded by Lucas and Mellody Hobson, is a 300,000-square-foot building in Exposition Park devoted to the proposition that visual storytelling is one continuous tradition, and that Norman Rockwell and Artemisia Gentileschi belong in the same institution.
A building that refuses to sit down
Ma Yansong of MAD, working with Stantec, did not design a box. The museum lifts off the ground on a curving underbelly, which means the thing you walk through first is not a lobby but a shaded public plaza, open on all sides to the park.
It is the single best decision in the building. Most museums announce themselves with steps and a threshold. This one gives you somewhere to stand before you have decided whether to go in.
Inside, the curves carry through the public rooms: the atrium, the soffits, the stair. The galleries themselves settle into conventional rectilinear spaces, which is the sensible thing to do when you have a Rockwell to hang. Above it all is an oculus that drops a single disc of California sky into the middle of the plan. Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA handled the surrounding 13 acres, which are now park and gardens rather than parking.
What is actually on the walls
More than 1,300 works across upward of 30 galleries and 100,000 square feet. The range is the point: van Gogh, Jacob Lawrence, Frida Kahlo, Robert Colescott and Charles White hang in the same institution as Beatrix Potter, George Herriman, Charles Schulz, Frank Frazetta, Robert Crumb, Frank Miller and Takashi Murakami.
The first floor does something genuinely unusual. Alongside the collection, the museum commissioned high-resolution reproductions of works that cannot travel: the Sistine Chapel ceiling with the Vatican Museums, the winged human-headed bulls from the Palace of Sargon II with the Louvre, the Aztec Sun Stone with Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, and the Altamira cave paintings with the Spanish national research centre that holds them.
The museum captured the scans itself and donated them back to each partner. You can stand in one room and see, in sequence, the oldest surviving narrative images humans made and the newest.
Two cinemas and a free library
The Robert Flaherty Theater and the Slavko Vorkapich Theater run curated programmes continuously through the day, with no separate tickets and no start times. You walk in mid-reel, the way you would walk up to a painting mid-thought.
The inaugural cinema exhibition is Star Wars in Motion, drawn from the complete Lucas Archives, covering vehicles, props, costumes and design work from the first six films. Luke’s Landspeeder is in it. So is the first physical build of General Grievous’s wheel bike.
The Research Library is free and open to the public, which for a founding collection of this scale is not a small gesture. Skywalker Grill handles the eating, under the same timber-ribbed curves as the rest of the building.
The neighbourhood part
The museum sits in the 90037 zip code, and residents there get the LM37 pass: free admission for themselves plus a guest, with a dedicated ticket allotment held back from general release. South LA neighbours were invited to a Community Preview Day on Sunday, September 13, nine days before the public opening.
The ordering is worth stating plainly. Founding members got the first week, from September 5. The neighbourhood came next, on the 13th. Everyone else waits for the 22nd. Lucas has called this “the people’s art,” and the building spends 13 acres and 300,000 square feet trying to mean it.
Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
Exposition Park, Los Angeles
Opens Tuesday, September 22, 2026
Admission $25 adults, $21 seniors, free for 17 and under. Timed entry required.
lucasmuseum.org
