Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Maps Out Its Opening Galleries in Los Angeles
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is beginning to reveal how it wants to tell its story. With its September opening approaching, the Los Angeles institution has announced the first exhibitions for its debut installation, and cofounder George Lucas is curating the galleries himself.
The initial presentation will draw from a collection of more than 40,000 objects, with about 12,000 works installed across 30 galleries inside the museum’s 300,000-square-foot building near Exposition Park. The site also includes an 11-acre campus, underscoring the scale of a project that has been years in the making.
Several artists with especially deep holdings in the collection will receive dedicated galleries, including Thomas Hart Benton, Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Frank Frazetta, and Jessie Willcox Smith. Smith is the only woman among those singled out for individual treatment in the announcement.
Other galleries will be organized by medium and subject. Planned sections include architecture, cinema, photography, muralism, comics and graphic stories, manga and anime, and children’s stories. The cinema galleries will be built from the Lucas Archives’ production designs, costumes, and props, while the photography section will feature documentary images by Robert Capa, Gordon Parks, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and Dorothea Lange.
The museum is also grouping works around broader themes. “Everyday life” will include subsections such as childhood, motherhood, love, and play. “Narrative Forms” will be divided into adventure, fantasy, romance, and science fiction. Additional galleries will examine “Western Stories,” described as myths of the American West; “History,” with paintings, prints, and illustrations that tell and retell major historical events; and “Civic Life,” focused on artists’ depictions of courthouses, polling places, political headquarters, and related settings.
In a press release, the museum framed the project as a corrective to the long-standing marginalization of illustration, comics, and graphic storytelling, calling the institution a home for what George Lucas has described as “the people’s art.” The installation strategy recalls the way the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the recently opened Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have organized permanent collection displays through thematic groupings.
The announcement also reflects a year of leadership turnover at the museum. Sandra Jackson-Dumont stepped down as director and CEO in February 2025, after Lucas said he would oversee the museum’s “content direction.” Chief curator Pilar Tompkins Rivas left in November, and the institution later laid off 15 employees, or about 14 percent of its full-time staff. As the opening nears, the museum’s curatorial choices are already signaling the narrative framework it intends to make central to its identity.
