The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art looks like a vessel from another galaxy and contains enough Star Wars history to satisfy devoted fans. Its larger ambition, however, is to persuade the art world that comic books, movie props, magazine illustrations and popular images belong beside celebrated paintings and sculpture.
LOS ANGELES, California | Published at 4:59 p.m. Eastern Time
George Lucas has spent most of his life building worlds, but his latest creation may be the first one visitors can physically walk into.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is scheduled to open to the public on September 22 in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park after nearly two decades of planning, multiple proposed locations, years of construction and a reported investment of approximately $1 billion.
From a distance, the 300,000-square-foot museum resembles a spacecraft that has descended into a South Los Angeles park. Its smooth exterior curves around an elevated central section, while an enormous opening underneath offers visitors a view through the building toward the sky.
Its shape immediately invites comparisons with the galaxy George Lucas created. Glass elevators, sweeping white surfaces and halls filled with cinematic objects only strengthen the feeling that visitors have entered a Star Wars environment.
For franchise fans, the museum will indeed be a spectacle.
Original props, costumes, models, illustrations and concept designs from Lucas’ film archives will occupy a significant place inside. One opening exhibition, “Star Wars in Motion,” will examine the vehicles depicted across the first six Star Wars films, including Luke Skywalker’s Landspeeder from A New Hope and the first physical construction of General Grievous’ Wheel Bike from Revenge of the Sith.
But Lucas has repeatedly resisted the idea that this is simply a Star Wars museum.
The institution’s real mission is broader and more provocative. It wants to redefine what an art museum can display, whose work deserves institutional respect and how images shape the stories societies tell about themselves.
A long-awaited opening in Los Angeles
The museum opens Tuesday, September 22, at One Lucas Plaza in Exposition Park, near the University of Southern California, where Lucas studied filmmaking.
The public debut follows a winding development history. Earlier versions of the project were proposed for San Francisco and Chicago, but political disputes, planning complications and local opposition prevented either location from moving forward.
Los Angeles was selected in 2017, and construction began in 2018. The pandemic and the complexity of the building pushed the opening date back several times.
At a recent press preview, Lucas acknowledged the toll of the project.
“I’m used to doing the impossible,” he said, according to The Guardian, before adding that the museum nearly broke his will.
Lucas and his wife, investor and business executive Mellody Hobson, co-founded the institution and supplied the collection at its center. Lucas began acquiring illustration and popular art in the 1970s, eventually combining his holdings with Hobson’s collection.
The result is a permanent collection exceeding 40,000 works. More than 1,300 objects will appear across the inaugural exhibitions, according to the Lucas Museum.
The building is the first special effect
Chinese architect Ma Yansong of MAD Architects designed the museum with Stantec. Rather than giving the building a conventional box-shaped museum form, Ma created a flowing structure without a single straight exterior line.
The surface is assembled from more than 1,200 individually shaped panels made of fiberglass-reinforced polymer. The material allowed the design team to create smooth curves while limiting the weight of the building’s exterior.
The museum rises over a central public plaza, touching the ground at relatively few points. Its main arch spans 185 feet, while a large elliptical opening provides a dramatic view toward the sky.
The visual effect is undeniably cinematic. Yet Ma has said the design was not modeled on a Star Wars spacecraft. His stated inspiration came from clouds, tree canopies and natural formations.
He described the structure as an environment or a scene, rather than an isolated building. That approach turns the visitor’s arrival into part of the museum’s narrative.
Architecture becomes the first work of storytelling.
The building contains more than 100,000 square feet of exhibition space spread across more than 30 galleries. It also includes two theaters, classrooms, event spaces, a research library and a full-service restaurant called Skywalker Grill.
Outside, landscape architect Mia Lehrer and Studio-MLA transformed what had been a large asphalt parking area into a 13-acre campus with gardens, sculptures, walking areas and public green space.
That landscape may become one of the museum’s most consequential contributions to the surrounding community. Visitors will not need a gallery ticket simply to experience the park or walk beneath the building.
Yes, Star Wars fans will have plenty to see
For many visitors, the Star Wars collection will be the initial attraction.
The Lucas Archives cover the filmmaker’s work from 1971 through 2012, the year Lucasfilm was sold to the Walt Disney Company. They include production art, costumes, props, designs and models used to construct cinematic worlds before computer-generated imagery became dominant.
“Star Wars in Motion” focuses on transportation as a form of storytelling. The vehicles in the films do more than move characters from one location to another. Their shapes communicate power, speed, class and political identity.
The battered Landspeeder driven by Luke Skywalker suggests a young man living at the edge of an unforgiving desert society. Imperial vehicles project scale and authority. Racers, wheel bikes and spacecraft communicate something about the characters who operate them before a word of dialogue is spoken.
That interpretive approach is what separates the gallery from a conventional memorabilia display. Visitors will see recognizable objects, but the museum wants them to consider why those designs work and how they carry narrative meaning.
The connection to Lucas’ galaxy also extends beyond the galleries.
Skywalker Grill, located near the top of the museum, takes inspiration from the hospitality associated with Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch. The restaurant is open to museum visitors and members of the general public, according to the institution.
The museum’s film program may deliver another major gift to Star Wars followers. Curated episodes of Star Wars: Detours, a long-shelved animated comedy developed by Seth Green and Matthew Senreich with Lucas as an executive producer, are expected to receive their first public screenings at the institution.
The series was announced in 2012 but disappeared after Disney acquired Lucasfilm. Green said in 2026 that 39 episodes had been completed and scripts existed for dozens more, according to Entertainment Weekly.
That makes the museum more than a home for familiar Star Wars objects. It could become a place where previously unseen pieces of Lucas-era franchise history finally reach audiences.
The museum’s real argument begins beyond the galaxy
The more ambitious experience starts when visitors move past Star Wars.
Lucas and Hobson are asking the art world to accept a category they call narrative art. The term encompasses images created to communicate stories, emotions, values, myths and social identities.
The collection moves across centuries and mediums. Its galleries include work associated with Artemisia Gentileschi, Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Norman Rockwell, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, Robert Colescott, Dorothea Lange, Frank Frazetta, Robert Crumb, Judy Baca and Banksy.
Comic strips, manga, children’s-book illustrations, magazine covers, photography, murals, cinema objects and conventional paintings appear within the same institution.
Visitors may encounter imagery connected to Winnie-the-Pooh, Where the Wild Things Are, Superman, Spider-Man, Astro Boy, Tintin, Garfield and Pikachu. A costume from The Wizard of Oz shares the museum’s larger world with fine art, documentary photography and public murals.
In many museums, those categories would be separated by departments or excluded entirely. The Lucas Museum argues that the boundary between fine art and popular art has concealed the cultural power of images that millions of people encounter in everyday life.
Ryan Linkof, the museum’s senior curator, described narrative art as the visual history people absorb daily, frequently without recognizing it as art. It includes advertising, newspaper photography, book covers, posters, comics, films and street art.
That is the museum’s most interesting argument. The image printed in a magazine, projected in a movie theater or drawn inside a comic book can influence public memory as deeply as an object displayed in a traditional gallery.
More than 30 galleries, organized around human life
The museum does not arrange its entire collection chronologically. Many galleries are organized around experiences and ideas, including childhood, family, work, play, sports, community, civic life and adventure.
This allows objects from different eras and artistic traditions to speak to one another.
A gallery focused on community can bring neighborhood scenes by Ernie Barnes into conversation with a Frida Kahlo self-portrait. The childhood section can place a Margaret Keane painting near a drawing by Picasso. A civic-life gallery can connect documentary photography of labor action with contemporary art opposing immigration raids.
Other rooms focus on individual artists, such as N.C. Wyeth, Jessie Willcox Smith and Maxfield Parrish. Separate areas examine comics, manga, fantasy, science fiction and children’s stories.
The first floor reaches further back. “The History of Narrative Art: Heroes, Myths, The Sacred” traces visual storytelling across thousands of years.
The exhibition incorporates recreations of works that cannot be physically moved, including the Sistine Chapel ceiling, cave paintings from Altamira, the Aztec Sun Stone and sculptures from the palace of the Assyrian ruler Sargon II. The museum says it worked with governments and cultural institutions to produce the reproductions using high-resolution images and 3D scans.
These displays attempt to connect ancient religious and political imagery with modern popular storytelling. The underlying proposition is that humans have always used pictures to explain power, heroism, morality, danger and belonging.
Star Wars becomes one modern branch of that much older tree.
A museum with relatively few written instructions
One of the institution’s more controversial choices may be what it does not place on the walls.
Many works have identifying labels listing the artist, title, year and material. Visitors should not expect every object to be accompanied by an extended curatorial essay.
Linkof said the museum intentionally avoided creating a heavily directed experience that tells visitors where to look or what conclusion to reach.
“We’re encouraging people to have their own individual encounters with works of art,” he told journalists during the preview, according to The Guardian.
Visitors who want additional context can use their phones to access information about individual objects.
The approach may appeal to people who find traditional museum labels intimidating or exhausting. It could also frustrate visitors who want historical explanation, particularly when politically charged works or ancient reproductions appear beside popular imagery.
The success of the strategy will depend on whether the visual relationships are clear enough to support meaningful interpretation without extensive text.
The question of access
Adult admission is listed at $25, while admission for visitors 65 and older is $21. Children 17 and younger are admitted free. Timed reservations are required, including for museum members.
The institution has also launched an access program for residents in the surrounding 90037 ZIP Code. Eligible South Los Angeles residents can receive an annual pass covering free admission for the pass holder and one guest.
The policy is meaningful because large cultural projects can transform neighborhoods without becoming genuinely accessible to the people who live nearby.
More than 65,000 residents live within the eligible ZIP Code, according to reporting by the Los Angeles Times. Whether those residents view the museum as part of their community will depend on programming, hiring, transportation, educational partnerships and long-term engagement, not simply the availability of free passes.
The research library will be free, and the surrounding gardens will provide public green space. Those features offer ways for residents to use the campus without purchasing a regular gallery ticket.
A major arrival during an uncertain moment for Los Angeles
The museum arrives while Los Angeles is preparing for the 2028 Olympic Games and attempting to strengthen its position as an international cultural destination.
It joins an expanding network of institutions that includes the California Science Center, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the California African American Museum, all located in or near Exposition Park.
The opening also comes during a period of uncertainty for Hollywood. The film industry has faced production declines, labor disruption and competition from other states and countries.
The Lucas Museum answers that uncertainty with a physical declaration that cinema and visual storytelling remain central to Los Angeles’ identity.
Its opening is particularly notable because Lucas and Hobson financed the project as a private philanthropic effort. The museum’s enormous scale gives it the ability to reshape conversations about illustration, cinema and popular art, but it also places unusual power over presentation and interpretation in the hands of its founders.
The institution will ultimately be judged on whether it can evolve beyond their personal collection and remain intellectually independent.
The verdict before opening day
Calling the Lucas Museum a Star Wars spectacle is not wrong. It is simply incomplete.
The building looks like an elegant interstellar craft. The elevators feel cinematic. Lucas’ archives contain artifacts that generations of fans have known only through a screen. “Star Wars in Motion” could become one of the museum’s most popular permanent attractions.
But the deeper spectacle is the museum’s collision of cultural categories.
Norman Rockwell and Spider-Man occupy the same institutional argument. Frida Kahlo, Pikachu, Banksy, Boba Fett, Dorothea Lange and the Cowardly Lion become evidence in one expansive case about how images produce meaning.
Lucas has created a museum that looks like science fiction on the outside while challenging a long-standing art-world hierarchy inside.
The building will attract visitors because of the filmmaker’s name and the mythology of Star Wars. Its future will depend on whether audiences accept the larger idea behind it: that the illustrations, comics, photographs and cinematic images surrounding everyday life are not cultural leftovers.
They are the stories through which people recognize the world.
Reporting and interview disclosure
This article was independently assembled from the museum’s official collection and opening materials, publicly available ticket information, press-preview reporting and attributed interviews conducted by other news organizations.
Principal sources
- Lucas Museum: September 22 opening announcement and exhibition details
- Lucas Museum: Founding mission and collection
- Lucas Museum: Member admission and ticket prices
- The Guardian: George Lucas unveils the museum to journalists
- Los Angeles Times: Free annual passes for South Los Angeles neighbors
- Artnet News: Inaugural exhibitions and featured works
- Entertainment Weekly: Planned debut of Star Wars: Detours