But “this one almost broke my will”. The film-maker was describing the decades of work that went into his latest project, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, as it was unveiled to the press in Los Angeles eight years after breaking ground, following attempts to build it in two other cities. Shaped like a spaceship and towering over the nearby University of Southern California – Lucas’s alma mater – the long-awaited institution finally opens on 22 September.
It aims to be a testament to visual storytelling across all kinds of media – paintings, comics, murals, photography, sculpture. The result is 100,000 sq ft of gallery space featuring a striking variety of pieces, ranging from works by Judy Baca, Norman Rockwell, Diego Rivera and Banksy to the Wizard of Oz’s Cowardly Lion costume to drawings of Asterix and Garfield. What unites the seemingly disparate works is their function: to tell a story, often in a single frame, as Lucas’s co-founder and wife, Mellody Hobson, told members of the press on Wednesday.
Visual storytelling “is the art that surrounds us”, said Ryan Linkof, the museum’s senior curator. Newspaper photographs, advertisements, book covers, comic books, posters, street art, movies.” The couple sees this storytelling as fundamental to the human experience. Narrative art “depicts the myths that anchor us, the stories that we believe in”, Hobson said; pictures, Lucas added, make those myths feel real.
All that “creates a group of people with a common belief system, and that common belief system allows them to work together and not kill each other”. The Lucas museum is divided into two sections, one containing most of the galleries and a pair of cinemas, and the other housing its mural collection as well as a research library. With its sleek, flying-saucer-like design, it’s impossible not to think of Star Wars, though the museum’s architect, Ma Yansong, says he was inspired more by tree canopies and clouds.
A plaza between the sections offers shade as well as an oculus: a round opening that allows visitors to “see the sky and the universe”, Yansong told the media. The museum’s construction is a saga of its own. Lucas began collecting art in the 1970s and over the years combined his collection with Hobson’s, Bates said.
About 20 years ago, according to Bates, Lucas began working toward the museum’s creation. Plans for it to be built in San Francisco or Chicago fell through. Finally, the project broke ground in Los Angeles in 2018, and eight years later, it is ready to open.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
