The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art was nearly built in San Francisco and then Chicago before finally landing in Los Angeles, but Los Angeles is really the only place suitable for a museum that is simultaneously infuriating, inspiring, bewildering, beautiful, noble, confusing, and destined, I think, to be extremely popular, if not necessarily in the world of traditional art criticism.
The Lucas Museum, which opened to the public on September 22, is a collection of art that George Lucas, the filmmaker famous for creating the Star Wars universe and franchise, either owns or finds inspiring, dressed up as a big spaceship with some unexpected and occasionally clashing accessories.
The museum uses the phrase narrative art to describe its lens for seeing the work it displays. “In a way, it’s kind of like the oldest form of art, in the sense that humans have really always used images to tell stories,” says Ryan Linkof, the museum’s senior curator and head of film programs. “And I think at the core, this project is really interested in the way that those stories, told through images, really build connections, and that those connections really shape the world.”
The art collection
Star Wars displays comprise a small fraction of the sprawling Lucas Museum art collection.
Photo by Iwan Baan/Courtesy of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is not, to be clear, a Star Wars museum, though the cinema section is for some reason limited to Star Wars (Lucas’s film credits also include Indiana Jones and American Graffiti, among many other titles, and certainly other filmmakers would not have seemed out of place here).
The museum’s collection includes about 1,300 individual works on display currently, and leans towards 20th-century genre art: manga, Western comics, Norman Rockwell, fantasy, sci-fi, adventure. Larger exhibitions feature artists such as Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, and, on the top floor, Banksy.
On the ground floor, an exhibition titled The History of Narrative Art: Heroes, Myths, the Sacred includes digital representations of the Altamira cave paintings (famous Upper Paleolithic depictions of animals, mostly) and Michelangelo’s David.
There’s an infectious feeling that comes from a private collection with a point of view like this: Lucas really loves this stuff and wants to place it in a context as elevated as it is in his own life.
The Treasure Island illustrations are a highlight of the N.C. Wyeth collection.
Photo by Paul Salveson/Courtesy of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
This aim is often refreshing and delightful. The Rockwell exhibition is astounding, a sort of Lucas Museum in miniature that includes both schmaltz and (often progressive political) masterpieces. The comics exhibition—with images from Pogo, Krazy Kat, The Adventures of Tintin, and The Far Side, plus lots of work by Robert Crumb and Chris Ware—is fantastic. I loved the N.C. Wyeth exhibition, showcasing a prolific painter and illustrator probably best known for his work illustrating Treasure Island. Banksy, who worked personally with the museum to display his pieces, headlines a fun, shadowy attic of murals.
Then there’s the baffling. The photography section, which is quite small, is a collection of the greatest hits of photography prints: Neil Leifer’s photo of a triumphant Muhammad Ali flexing over a prone Sonny Liston, a Richard Avedon shot of the Beatles, Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl. I’m not sure what they have in common or what they’re trying to tell me, but they’re definitely all photographs.
The architecture section, like the cinema section, seems self-serving as it contains only renderings and photos of the Lucas Museum and other structures by architect Ma Yansong’s firm MAD. There is an abysmal Kaws sculpture of a sad Mickey Mouse/Pinocchio–type creature done in elegantly grained wood, which is thankfully tucked away in the back.
The layout (cinemas, a library, café, and Skywalker Grill)
The ground floor houses two movie theaters (you can check out the film program and schedule online), a café, and the history of narrative art exhibition. There’s also a gorgeous arts and crafts–style research library across three levels. The fourth level contains all the main exhibits; the fifth contains a murals exhibit; and the roof hosts a restaurant called Skywalker Grill, which incorporates ingredients sourced from Lucas’s northern California farm and ranch. The menu lists museum-café standards such as Wagyu burger, burrata and tomato salad, braised short ribs, and pigs in a blanket (in a croissant with everything bagel seasoning).
The museum’s library space is surprisingly delightful.
Photo by Hufton+Crow/Courtesy of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
The elevators are in really fun glass tubes, though you can access the fifth floor only through a separate elevator on the fourth floor. That confusion extends to the overall layout of the museum; on the fourth floor, which is the main floor, exhibitions flow into each other often without any delineation, so you might see a big painting of a gigantic fantasy spider from the Lord of the Rings books and then turn a corner and immediately be presented with a Frida Kahlo self-portrait.
A significant collection of works by artists of color (Narsiso Martinez, Kadir Nelson, Ernie Barnes, Robert Colescott) sits adjacent to some really regressive 1920s pulp paintings of cowboys and Indians, or busty bikini girls in space.
The experience
If you want more information and insights into the works on display . . . you aren’t likely to get much. Placards provide minimal details, listing the artist, the title (also translated into Spanish), the date, and the medium (not translated into Spanish). Additional information is available, sometimes, via a web app, which allows you to point your phone camera at a piece to identify it, but even this app contains little discussion of what the piece means or why it’s on display.
“The idea behind the in-gallery experience was really kind of core all along,” says Linkof. “That was something that George said really early on: He didn’t necessarily want someone to walk into a gallery and feel like their experience is already guided and directed. Once you read a text and you see how you’re supposed to understand it, maybe it kind of prevents the idea of intuitive encounter and emotional response, which I think is really important to him.”
Navigating the museum, both physically and intellectually, can be tricky and even frustrating.
Photo by Hufton+Crow/Courtesy of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
It’s understandable for a museum, especially one that includes art not typically seen as highbrow, to emphasize visceral impact over didactic education. But for those who want to learn more about Frank Frazetta’s influence on the medium of comic books and paperback novel covers, or find out who Alfred E. Newman is and what he represents, or want to read the text of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s manga The Invisible Corpse but don’t speak Japanese, that kind of information is nowhere to be found.
Relying on a web app also requires that museumgoers stare at their phones. That said, the minimalist placards accomplish a related goal, which is to make this museum seem less like a museum and more like a good time.
The verdict
I visited during neighborhood preview day, an early preview for locals and community members, which I think was the right time to see it. The crowd during my visit was having fun. Kids ran around, pointing at paintings and sculptures before moving on to the next. Museum staff gushed about the Star Wars exhibition. Parents crowded around gorgeous Maurice Sendak illustrations from Where the Wild Things Are. There was none of the forced worship of hushed traditional museums. I think the Lucas Museum has really accomplished something by democratizing historically slighted genre art and, perhaps more significantly, by making a legitimately delightful museum, both despite and because of its chaos.
Anyone can visit the surrounding gardens without a ticket.
Photo by Hufton+Crow/Courtesy of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
Critics have largely been some combination of amused and hostile toward the Lucas Museum. “Lucas has brought the history of the Western art museum to its inevitable conclusion,” wrote Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post. “From a curatorial perspective, there’s no throughline here—the Museum of Narrative Art lacks any kind of narrative,” Maximilíano Durón decried in ArtNews.
I am not a museum worker or art critic, and while I don’t disagree with the critics—the collection is at times bizarre, the layout of the museum is confusing, and the lack of information accompanying the art is a misstep—I think they’re undervaluing the sheer joy of this weirdo museum.
The location
In Exposition Park, in South Los Angeles, next to the University of Southern California campus and just south of downtown, the Lucas Museum sits in a complex of stadiums, museums, and gardens, including BMO Stadium (soccer), the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (where opening and closing ceremonies for the 2028 Summer Olympics will be held), and the California Science Center.
Founded by Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson (who is also the former chair of both Starbucks and DreamWorks), the museum has a retrofuturistic design of white ovals and curves; it really does look like a spaceship. The grounds, which are open to anyone, even those without a ticket, are lovely and sprawling, with an occasional giant sculpture of Jabba the Hutt.
The striking structure sits just south of downtown L.A. and is in a complex of stadiums that includes the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where opening and closing ceremonies for the 2028 Olympics will be held.
Photo by Hufton+Crow/Courtesy of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
How to visit the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is located at 1 Lucas Plaza in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, and costs $25 per ticket. Admission is free for those 17 and younger, and it’s $21 for seniors. Tickets must be booked in advance. Paid parking is available, or you can take the metro to the Expo/Vermont stop.
