Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens in Los Angeles after years of delays

“I’m used to doing the impossible,” George Lucas said on Wednesday. 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. “It is the art in the visual history that we assume every day, often without even realizing it. 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. LA, Hobson told the media, is “where we believe we were always meant to be”. Bates agreed: “The largest, most popular form of narrative art is cinema. So what better space for it to be than the home of storytelling?”

The ground floor features a brief tour through thousands of years of visual storytelling, beginning with an immersive reproduction of cave paintings before moving to paintings, mosaics and sculptures – some original, some reproduced – depicting stories from ancient civilizations and the Bible. The exhibition sets the historical context for the museum’s core collection, mostly from the 20th and 21st centuries, reached via round glass elevators that do nothing to dispel the Star Wars aura.

The galleries here are sorted into an odd mix of categories. There are rooms that focus on medium – the comics room contains strips from Krazy Kat, Little Orphan Annie, The Adventures of Tintin and Superman; the children’s stories room contains art from Where the Wild Things Are and fairytale illustrations; the manga room features Astro Boy and a portrait of Pikachu.

Other rooms are divided by theme: the “community” area contains neighborhood scenes by Ernie Barnes and a Frida Kahlo self-portrait; the “childhood” area hosts a Margaret Keane painting, Children of Paris, and a Picasso drawing titled Little Girl; “civic life” features photography of a 1968 sanitation workers’ strike and a painting by Shepard Fairey and Ernesto Yerena Montejano opposing immigration raids.

Still other galleries are organized by single artists – NC Wyeth, Jessie Willcox Smith, Maxfield Parrish – and others by genre: science fiction, fantasy, adventure. And while this is very much not a Star Wars museum, it has plenty to offer fans, including an exhibit that focuses on modes of transportation in the films and contains vehicle models, production artwork and costumes. (There are other surprise nods to the films around the museum.)

Finally, there is the mural room, with some of the museum’s most memorable pieces. A video traces the length of Judith Baca’s mural of the region’s history along the Los Angeles River; nearby are several Banksy works on walls that have been extracted and hung in the space. There’s also a huge image of the French artist JR’s Kikito, an installation that shows a child looking over the US-Mexico border wall.

Each work has a small plaque giving its title and year, the artist’s name and the materials used. But there isn’t much else on the walls to tell visitors what they’re viewing – no blurbs or lengthy descriptions. That was deliberate, Linkof said. Lucas and the curators didn’t want a “heavily mediated” experience, telling people “where to look, how to look, what to think, how to understand and interpret something”, he said. “We’re encouraging people to have their own individual encounters with works of art and take away what they feel like speaks to them.” That said, those who are curious about a work’s origins or context can scan the images with their phone to get a brief description of who made the work and why.

Many of the artists here are well-known, but as the museum’s leadership emphasizes, they often don’t receive the same institutional respect their peers do. John Romita Jr’s Spider-Man panels don’t tend to appear in museums that also feature the Sistine Chapel ceiling, re-created here with backlit photography. “Rockwell in his day was not considered an artist, more an advertising illustrator, but actually, the process, the level of depth in those images – he is one of our greatest storytellers,” said Tracey Bates, the museum’s CEO, in an interview. With the museum, Lucas and Hobson – who call the Sistine Chapel “God’s first comic book”, Bates says – hope to elevate the standing of these visual storytellers.