The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a New Endeavor From the Creator of 'Star Wars,' Is a Story in Itself

The new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles is full of unexpected juxtaposition. Just outside an exhibition on children’s stories housing works by Beatrix Potter, E.H. Shepard and Maurice Sendak stands a brand-new Banksy piece depicting a murderous lion, for example.

In another part of the five-story building, a Frida Kahlo self-portrait hangs in view of Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s oil-on-canvas depicting dogs playing poker as well as the Batman suit from The Dark Knight. All these pieces, however, fall under what museum founder and Star Wars creator George Lucas calls “narrative art,” or works that tell stories through images. Ryan Linkof, the museum’s senior curator and head of film programs, described it as “the visual culture we consume every day.” Lucas, who also created the Indiana Jones franchise and founded the studio Lucasfilm, defines it as the people’s art, or artwork that “creates a group of people with a common belief system.” The road to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opening on September 22 is a story in itself.

Since at least 2010, Lucas had sought a home for the project in San Francisco, specifically the land near the Golden Gate Bridge managed by the Presidio Trust. The Trust rejected Lucas’ proposal in February 2014, and he and his wife, Mellody Hobson, turned to Chicago as a new potential location. The Chicago effort, championed by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, fell apart in June 2016.

Los Angeles’ mayor at that time, Eric Garcetti, also wooed Lucas, with the city signing a deal in January 2017 to have the museum built on a strip of parking lot in Exposition Park. It took nine more years for the Lucas Museum to open its doors. Seated on a 13-acre campus, the 300,000-square-foot building includes over 30 galleries featuring approximately 1,200 works, most of them from Lucas’ founding collection of 40,000 items.

Lucas acknowledges his varied and vast collection “spans genres, media and time.” But to him, the works have one key thing in common: “They deserve to be in a museum.” The museum holds exhibitions on the fourth floor, has a gallery on murals on the fifth floor along with a restaurant, and includes a research library open to the public, an immersive “History of Narrative Art” show on the first floor, and two movie theaters continuously playing documentaries and experimental short films dedicated to the art of cinema. Making this museum a reality, Lucas said during a press event at the museum in early September, was a trial for him. The rejected proposals in both San Francisco and Chicago involved years of expense and effort, and some critics were skeptical about having a museum dedicated to these artists in the first place.

We still had to deal with bureaucracies and people who have contrary thinking, but we managed to make our way through all that. So this is a big celebration for us, because it’s taken so long to get here.” Speaking of contrary thinking, for Lucas, the type of groupings that involve placing that Kahlo next to Batman were always part of the plan. There’s no pamphlet to tell you where to find David Hockney, or where Norman Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With, a piece on loan from the Norman Rockwell Museum depicting federal marshals escorting 6-year-old Ruby Bridges to a newly desegregated New Orleans school, is displayed.