Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Sets Inaugural Exhibitions for Los Angeles Opening
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will open in Los Angeles on September 22 with a first wave of exhibitions that places storytelling at the center of the institution’s identity. Co-founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, the museum is launching with more than 1,200 works selected from a founding collection of more than 40,000 objects.
The opening program will unfold across more than 30 galleries occupying roughly 100,000 square feet inside the museum’s 300,000-square-foot building, designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects with Stantec. The scale alone signals the museum’s ambition: to present narrative art not as a single genre, but as a wide visual language that moves across media, eras, and audiences.
Among the headline solo presentations are Thomas Hart Benton, Jessie Willcox Smith, and N.C. Wyeth. Benton will be represented by works depicting American life, while Smith’s classic scenes from fairy tales and children’s books and Wyeth’s illustrations from the 1910s through the 1940s will anchor the museum’s attention to illustration and printed storytelling. Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish, and Frank Frazetta will each receive dedicated galleries as well.
Themed exhibitions broaden the frame. “Children’s Stories” will bring together illustrations by Beatrix Potter, Leo Politi, E.H. Shepard, and Jacob Lawrence. “Comics & Graphic Stories” will survey American and European comics through works by Mœbius, Marie Severin, Jack Kirby, Alison Bechdel, Jim Lee, Frank Miller, and Rafael Navarro, alongside a complementary look at manga and anime.
Other sections will focus on murals, photography, cinema, architecture, history, civic life, western stories, and “Everyday Life,” with galleries devoted to childhood, motherhood, play, school, sports, and work. The museum will also show works by Frida Kahlo, Charles White, Kadir Nelson, and Robert Colescott.
Taken together, the inaugural exhibitions frame narrative art as a continuum that stretches from prehistoric image-making to comics and cinema. For a museum built around the idea of “the people’s art,” the opening is less a single exhibition than a broad argument about how images tell stories across cultures and generations.
