After years in the making, George Lucas and Mellody Hobson’s Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will finally open to the public in Los Angeles on 22nd September 2026, bringing everything from Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo and Artemisia Gentileschi to comics, murals, Star Wars and previously unseen works by Banksy under one extraordinary roof.
Located in Exposition Park, the new museum is dedicated to what its founders describe as the universal tradition of storytelling through images. Its collection stretches from prehistoric cave paintings to contemporary screen culture, deliberately placing illustration, comics and cinema alongside painting, sculpture and photography rather than treating them as separate cultural worlds.
And it’s big. Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects with Stantec, the curving 300,000-square-foot building contains more than 100,000 square feet of exhibition space spread across over 30 galleries. It sits within a new 13-acre landscape designed by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA.
George Lucas said:
“The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art was created to honor humanity’s stories and the artists who illustrate them. The artists in this collection didn’t just create images, they connected our modern imaginations with our ancient emotions—with common beliefs creating community. Their work spans genres, media, and time. They deserve to be in a museum.”
1,300 works – and a lot of Star Wars
The inaugural exhibitions will present more than 1,300 works from the collection.
The journey begins with The History of Narrative Art: Heroes • Myths • The Sacred, looking at how images have created mythologies, inspired devotion, communicated power and helped shape societies over tens of thousands of years.
Elsewhere, the collection moves freely between art history and popular culture. Artists represented include Vincent van Gogh, Jacob Lawrence, Beatrix Potter, Charles White and Ernie Barnes, while galleries dedicated to particular forms of storytelling bring together comics, manga, graphic novels, photography and murals.
That means George Herriman, Charles Schulz, Frank Miller and Jim Lee can sit within the same museum as Takashi Murakami, Robert Capa, Gordon Parks, Diego Rivera, JR and Judith F. Baca. Major figures in 20th-century American illustration, including Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Jessie Willcox Smith, Maxfield Parrish, Frank Frazetta and Thomas Hart Benton will receive their own galleries.
Unsurprisingly, Lucas’s own contribution to visual storytelling is also part of the opening.
Star Wars in Motion draws on the Lucas Archives to explore vehicles from the first six films through original concept designs, props and costumes — from Luke Skywalker’s Landspeeder in A New Hope to the first physical build of General Grievous’s Wheel Bike for Revenge of the Sith.
Perhaps more unexpectedly, the museum’s monumental storytelling gallery will include previously unseen acquisitions direct from Banksy’s studio alongside work by Diego Rivera, JR and material from Judith F. Baca’s The Great Wall of Los Angeles.
A building without a straight line
The museum itself is difficult to ignore.
Ma Yansong conceived its organic, almost spacecraft-like structure as an extension of Exposition Park rather than a conventional museum building. Its curving form was designed without a single straight line, while a 185-foot central arch lifts the building above a public plaza and an elliptical oculus opens four storeys above visitors.
“I am deeply grateful to George Lucas and Mellody Hobson for giving me the opportunity to create a building that will faithfully serve the visitors and the art while being as light and free as a cloud, or a dream,”
said Ma Yansong.
“Designed with emotional architecture spaces, so that it is fluid in every part, and merged like a natural feature of the landscape into Exposition Park, the building invites everyone to participate in a journey of discovery and become part of the story of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.”
The surrounding landscape is almost as ambitious. A former asphalt parking lot has been transformed into 13 acres of parkland containing more than 300 newly planted trees, indigenous and drought-tolerant planting, a hanging garden, meadow, amphitheatre and waterfall-like fountain.
Ten monumental sculptures will be permanently installed along its walkways, and the park will be free to visit. Among them are Fernando Botero’s Maternity, Prune Nourry’s Terracotta Daughters and — keeping the boundaries between art history and cinema suitably blurred — sculptures depicting Princess Leia, Yoda and Grogu.
The museum also includes two cinemas offering continuous film screenings and a free Research Library whose holdings range from rare books and underground comics to more than 30,000 comic books. The library also incorporates material from the former Skywalker Ranch Library, approximately 3,000 art books donated by Steve Martin and Ann Martin, and more than 2,900 volumes from mythologist Joseph Campbell’s personal library — including books containing his own annotations and research notes.
Mellody Hobson said:
“We wanted a museum unlike any other — one that brings people from every walk of life through the same doors. That’s why this collection holds so many different kinds of stories: so that more people can walk in and, somewhere in these galleries, see themselves — and the world they know—reflected back. That kind of recognition is what we built this place to offer.”
The Lucas Museum will be inaugurated with an Opening Night on 19th September co-chaired by Julie Bell, Tom Cruise, Greta Gerwig, Jensen Huang, JR, Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro and Pharrell Williams, before opening to everyone three days later.
Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Exposition Park, Los Angeles, opens to the public Tuesday 22nd September 2026. @lucasmuseum
