Lucas Museum of Narrative Art announces 2026 opening date
Originally scheduled to open in 2025, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has announced it will now open on Sept. 22, 2026, but it will not be a Star Wars museum. Instead, the first-of-its-kind institution is devoted to the meaning and impact of storytelling, of which the “Star Wars” saga is certainly an example.
Co-founded by the filmmaker and his wife Mellody Hobson, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will be the first museum to focus exclusively on storytelling through images, with an extensive collection of artwork from across cultures, places, times, and mediums, including paintings, sculptures, murals, photography, comic art, book and magazine illustrations, and the arts of filmmaking.
Rendering by Stantec and MIR
“We believe that narrative art can connect us and help shape a more just society,” said Director and CEO Sandra Jackson-Dumont. “As a result, every element of this institution contributes to that idea, [including] the campus with its iconic building and […] the wonderfully evolving collection of narrative art that features multifaceted perspectives through the stories humans have told throughout history.”
The Lucas Museum Campus
Currently under construction, the 300,000-square-foot museum sits on an 11-acre campus in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park, and includes new green space, two theaters, a library, restaurant, café, retail store, and community spaces.
Taking inspiration from the large trees in Exposition Park that “provide places of shelter and gathering,” the museum’s innovative building will include a gathering space in the central plaza. The building surface will consist of more than 1,500 curved fiberglass-reinforced polymer (FRP) panels, each uniquely shaped and placed.
The surrounding park will offer programming for museum audiences and the local community, with an amphitheater, hanging garden, pedestrian bridge, and more than 200 trees that will change with the seasons, offering new experiences with each visit. The new park and gardens will also employ a rain-harvesting system to capture water for irrigation.
The Lucas Museum Collection
The building’s thirty-five galleries (totaling 100,000 square feet) have names that reflect key elements of the human experience—love, family, community, play, work, sports, childhood, adventure, and more.
“This is a museum of the people’s art—the images are illustrations of beliefs we live with every day. For that reason, this art belongs to everyone,” said Lucas Museum co-founder Mellody Hobson. “Our hope is that as people move through the galleries, they will see themselves, and their humanity, reflected back.”
The permanent collection of more than 40,000 works represents themes and viewpoints used by narrative art to engage its audiences, including works by artists such as Norman Rockwell, Kadir Nelson, Jessie Willcox Smith, N. C. Wyeth, Beatrix Potter, Judith F. Baca, Frida Kahlo, and Maxfield Parrish; comic art legends such as Winsor McCay, Jack Kirby, Frank Frazetta, Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, and Robert Crumb; and photographers Gordon Parks, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Dorothea Lange.
The museum will also house the Lucas Archives, containing models, props, concept art, and costumes from Lucas’s filmmaking career.
“Through narrative art, people from every age and background can find connections between their lives and the lives of others across eras, cultures, and regions of the globe,” said Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Curatorial and Collections Pilar Tompkins Rivas.
Some notable pieces in the collection are:
The museum’s collection of original works created for comics, books, and magazines include Alex Raymond’s “Flash Gordon” issue number 1, Jaime Hernandez’s 2010 alt comic “Love and Rockets,” and children’s book illustrations by Jerry Pinkney for “Black Cowboy, Wild Horses: A True Story” (1998) and Weshoyot Alvitre for “At the Mountain’s Base” (2019), her book about a Navajo World War II pilot.
Alex Raymond, Flash Gordon Sunday strip, January 7, 1934
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