George Lucas has spent the better part of five decades collecting stories. Not the ones locked inside books, but the ones hanging on walls, printed in comics, splashed across cinema screens and occasionally involving a lightsaber. And on 22 September, he’s finally letting everyone else in.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park inside a 300,000-square-foot building that kinda looks capable of leaving Earth. Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD with Stantec, the curving, spaceship-ish structure contains more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space and over 30 galleries dedicated to the ways humans have told stories through pictures. And no, it’s not a Star Wars museum.
George Lucas and Mellody Hobson founded the place to put so-called ‘narrative art’ on the big stage. The inaugural exhibitions stretch from ancient sculpture and Renaissance paintings to photography, murals, children’s illustrations, comics and manga.
Frida Kahlo, Norman Rockwell, Beatrix Potter, Jack Kirby, Dorothea Lange and Diego Rivera all make appearances.
Then you get to the movie stuff. The complete Lucas Archives from 1971 to 2012 lives here too, bringing production designs, costumes, props and other bits of cinema history into the mix. Turns out the bloke behind Star Wars and Indiana Jones kept a few things.
Outside, the museum spills into a 13-acre campus of parkland and gardens designed by landscape architect Mia Lehrer and Studio-MLA. There’s also a free research library and, because George Lucas was hardly going to call it ‘the rooftop restaurant’, the fifth-floor Skywalker Grill.
After years of waiting, one of the world’s more unusual museums is finally ready for visitors (let all the Force jokes start now).
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