The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has announced that it will open to the public on September 22, 2026—sixteen years after George Lucas first proposed such a museum, twelve years after he selected Ma Yansong and MAD Architects to design it, and eight years after construction began at Exposition Park in Los Angeles.
It looks like the roller coaster ride that is the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will finally come to an end in ten months time. While Los Angeles is a logical choice for a museum devoted to film and other means of “illustrated storytelling,” it was not Lucas's first choice. That was San Francisco, where Lucasfilm was headquartered, but the city turned him down. Then Chicago, the hometown of his wife and museum co-founder Mellody Hobson, said it would give Lucas a prime but contested lakefront site to build the mountain-like museum designed by Ma Yansong and MAD. That was in 2014, but two years of legal wrangling led the Star Wars director to announce he was abandoning the effort and taking the museum west, to California—either Los Angeles or San Francisco. Los Angeles won the commission in early 2017 and construction started the following spring, with an optimistic timeline then indicating a 2021 completion. Construction delays exacerbated by the pandemic, as well as shakeups at the executive level, kept pushing the completion date farther into the future—until last week's announcement of a firm opening date: September 22, 2026; a Tuesday.
The 11-acre site Lucas and Yansong have been building on since 2018 is a former parking lot on the west edge of Exposition Park, a 116-acre park southwest of Downtown Los Angeles that is also home to Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the California Science Center, and other cultural, entertainment, and recreational venues. MAD's 300,000-square-foot building sits upon—and literally over—new green space designed by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA and is capped by green roofs and solar panels. The building consists of galleries (35 of them, covering 100,000 sf), two theaters, a library, restaurant, café, retail store, and community spaces. Stantec serves as executive architect on the project.
Per the Lucas Museum's announcement last week, the institution's “permanent collection holds more than 40,000 works representing one of the most significant collections of narrative art.” The 35 galleries “are named to reflect the human experience—love, family, community, play, work, sports, childhood, adventure, and more. They will display familiar pieces by beloved illustrators; mural paintings of the 20th and 21st centuries; comic art, of which the museum has deep and extensive holdings; children’s book illustrations; science fiction illustrations; and the fantastic visions captured in 20th-century culture.”
