The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a $1bn project that has been under construction since 2018 and is expected to open sometime in 2026, has laid off 15 full-time employees and another seven part-time employees. The layoffs represent a 14% reduction in the museum’s full-time staff.
A Lucas Museum spokesperson told The Los Angeles Times that the staff reductions were “due to a necessary shift of the institution’s focus to ensure we open on time next year”.
Many of the roles eliminated were from the institution’s public programmes and education teams, and included the curator of film programmes Bernardo Rondeau, according to the Times. Rondeau was in France for the Cannes Film Festival when he learned he had been laid off; he was previously the founding director of film programming at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
“Education remains a central pillar of the Lucas Museum,” a museum representative added in a statement. “It is a tremendously difficult decision to reorganise roles and to eliminate staff, but the restructure will allow the museum’s teams to work more efficiently to bring the museum to life for the public.”
The museum also recently lost its director and chief executive, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, who left the institution at the end of March after five years at its helm. Jim Gianopulos, the former chairman and chief executive of 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures, has taken over chief-executive duties on an interim basis; the film-maker George Lucas has since taken the helm of “content direction” at his namesake museum. The Star Wars director co-founded the museum with his wife, Mellody Hobson, the co-chief executive of the asset-management firm Ariel Investments.
The museum’s futuristic 300,000 sq. ft building, designed by Ma Yansong of the firm Mad Architects, is in advanced stages of construction in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park. (Previous plans to build it in San Francisco and Chicago met with opposition.)
The institution’s collection includes contemporary, modern and Old Master works with a narrative bent acquired by Lucas and Hobson—from Lucas Cranach the Elder’s The Judgment of Solomon (1526) and a Triumph of Galatea (around 1650) attributed to Artemisia Gentileschi and Onofrio Palumbo, to Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait Dedicated to Dr Eloesser (1940), Norman Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barbershop (1950), Robert Colescott's George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975) and Ernie Barnes’s The Drum Major (2003). In 2020, Lucas and Hobson also acquired the Separate Cinema Archive, a trove of more than 37,000 objects chronicling African American cinema from 1904 to the present.
