When the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art finally opens in Los Angeles on 22 September, visitors will be treated to a suite of 18 thematic exhibitions curated by George Lucas, the Star Wars film-maker who founded the museum with his wife Mellody Hobson. The inaugural lineup of shows, revealed by the museum on Thursday (30 April), offers a fuller picture of the institution’s collection and how the concept of “narrative art” will manifest on its walls.
The exhibitions will bring together more than 1,200 objects installed across more than 30 galleries spanning around 100,000 sq. ft. Some of the exhibitions will be devoted to specific media, disciplines and genres of art like photography, architecture, cinema and stories of the American West, while others take on particular narrative formats or subcultural categories like children’s stories, manga and anime, and comics and graphic novels. Still other shows will be broadly thematic, like History, Everyday life (further broken down into topics like “Community”, “Love”, “Motherhood” and “Sports”) and Narrative forms (including subsections on adventure, fantasy, romance and science-fiction).
Rafael Navarro, art for Sonámbulo: Mexican Stand-Off, 2006 Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
Lucas’s inaugural programme gives a sense of the collection’s biggest strengths as there will be six exhibitions devoted to individual American artists: the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), the science fiction and fantasy artist Frank Frazetta (1928-2010), the illustrator and children’s book artist Jessie Willcox Smith (1863-1935), the painter and illustrator Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966), the popular artist and illustrator Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) and the painter and illustrator N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945).
Some of the medium-specific exhibitions will also showcase the museum’s holdings of canonical and contemporary art. The show Murals, for instance, will include large-scale works by the Mexican Modernist Diego Rivera, the Los Angeles-based activist artist Judith F. Baca and the popular French photo-muralist JR, among others. The exhibition Photography will include images by Dorothea Lange, Robert Capa, Gordon Parks and Alfred Eisenstaedt, among others.
Doug Chiang, Podrace Crash, production art for Star Wars: Episode I –
The Phantom Menace, 1995-99 Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. © & ™ Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved
The inaugural lineup of exhibitions will offer just a taste of the Lucas Museum’s collection, which now totals more than 40,000 works. It includes the Separate Cinema Archive, a collection of materials documenting the history of African American film, as well as the Lucas Archives of costumes, props, models and art related to its co-founders' films. Lucas has been leading the museum’s curatorial programme since the museum’s director and chief executive Sandra Jackson-Dumont left her post in February 2025. In May 2025, the museum laid off 14% of its full-time staff and cut seven part-time roles.
First announced in 2013, the Lucas Museum was originally due to be built in San Francisco (near Lucas’s longtime home base in Marin County) then Chicago (Hobson’s hometown) and ultimately Los Angeles. In that time its budget has grown from around $700m to a reported $1bn. Now its campus in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park is in the final stages of construction, with the exterior of its futuristic building by Ma Yansong of the architecture firm Mad essentially complete and the surrounding green spaces on its 11-acre campus, designed by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA, coming to life.
The Lucas Museum will be the third major art institution construction project to open in Los Angeles this year, following the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's new $724m David Geffen Galleries—which, ironically, opens to the public on "Star Wars Day", 4 May—and the artificial-intelligence art space Dataland, from the studio of artist Refik Anadol, which will open on 20 June.
