The long-awaited Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles has set an opening date of September 22, 2026.
The Lucas Museum has been in the works for over ten years. Its founders, filmmaker George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, co-CEO and president of Ariel Investments, first began exploring locations for the museum in 2013, with San Francisco and later Chicago as possible locations.
Eventually, they landed in Los Angeles, acquiring a site in Exposition Park in 2017 and breaking ground the following year. Construction of the building, designed by MAD’s Ma Yansong, has been delayed several times. It was originally scheduled to open in 2021, then postponed to 2023 and then again to 2025. In late 2024, the museum quietly postponed the opening again to 2026, although no target month or season has been announced so far.
The museum’s current collection of more than 40,000 items focuses on what Lucas and Hobson called “narrative art,” which is anything involving visual storytelling, from fine art to pop culture, such as comic books and movie posters. The collection also includes the Lucas Archives, which includes models, props, concept art and costumes from Lucas films. Their voracious collection of museums has earned them a spot in every issue of the magazine art newsList of the top 200 collectors 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, NC Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish and Gordon Parks. The Lucas family also purchased high-profile works by Norman Rockwell Say grace (1951) Sold for $46 million at Sotheby’s auction in 2013; Rockwell’s Barber Shop in Shafton (1950), sold by the Berkshire Museum in Massachusetts for an undisclosed price in 2018; and an iconic work by Robert Colescott George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: A Page from an American History Textbook (1975) sold for $15.3 million at a 2021 Sotheby’s auction.
“This is a people’s museum of art – these images exemplify the beliefs we live with every day,” Hobson said in a statement. “So this art belongs to everyone. We hope that when people walk through the gallery, they will see themselves and their humanity reflected.”
Lucas added in a statement, “Stories are myths and when they are illustrated, they help humans understand the mysteries of life.”
The Lucas Museum is also facing some changes this year in terms of staffing. Its high-profile director and CEO, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, was poached from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she served as education chair, a role she resigned from in February. At the time, the museum said Jackson Dumont’s role would be replaced by Lucas taking over the institution’s “content direction” and named Jim Gianopulos, the former chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures, as interim CEO. (At the time, the museum said it was searching for a permanent CEO.) Then in May, the museum laid off 15 employees, or 14% of its full-time staff, primarily impacting its learning and engagement and museum services teams.
The museum has been doing some promotional work ahead of the announcement, hosting 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 Jiang, while the New York panel did not feature Lucas but featured J.R., Boris Vallejo, Julie Bell, Bell and Martin Scorcese serve as hosts.
Speaking at the San Diego panel, Lucas said: “This museum is dedicated to the idea that stories, myths, and any kind of storytelling that’s designed to impact people and build community are extremely important to society, creating society, and creating community. Art illustrates that story, so this is a people’s palace of art.”
