A New Hope for George Lucas’s $1 Billion Museum

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens to the public today in Los Angeles. Founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas and business executive Mellody Hobson, the museum extends Lucas’s interest in visual storytelling beyond a galaxy far, far away.

The $1 billion museum introduces a collection and exhibition programme exploring how images tell stories across fine art and popular culture. It draws substantially on the couple’s collection, which has grown to more than 40,000 works.

Its arrival in Exposition Park will surely come as a relief. It follows roughly 17 years of planning, abandoned proposals in San Francisco and Chicago and a series of delays to the Los Angeles building.

Doug Chiang, Starship Landing Platform, production art for Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clone. Courtesy of the Lucas Museum

The museum describes its central idea as ‘narrative art’, a category that takes in fine art, illustration, cinema, comics and photography. The collection includes paintings and photography alongside comics, commercial illustration and material from the Lucas film archives.

“It’s art that illustrates stories,” Ryan Linkof, senior curator and head of film programmes, tells The Art Journal. “While it’s a new term that we as an institution are providing a new spotlight on, it is in some ways the oldest form of art.” The term groups together forms that museums have traditionally treated very differently, including commercial illustration, but which have often had enormous cultural reach. “These are images that are seen by millions of people and really help to shape the world that we live in,” he explains.

Among Linkof’s personal highlights are paintings by fantasy and science-fiction illustrator Frank Frazetta and Norman Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barber Shop.

Norman Rockwell, Shuffleton’s Barbershop. Courtesy of the Lucas Museum

Rather than prescribing a single route through the galleries, the institution allows visitors to move freely between displays and make connections between works. Linkof says the lack of a prescribed route is intended to make the museum more accessible. “It allows people to encounter objects on their own and have an intuitive response to the works,” he says. “There’s a kind of accessible point of entry for almost everybody. If you’re a Star Wars fan, you could come and see a Frida Kahlo painting across the hall, and vice versa.”

For visitors seeking more structured interpretation, the institution offers an 800-page publication, a digital guide and a film programme. Linkof says the project has also allowed the museum to research works that have attracted relatively little academic study. “These objects are so unique, and many are almost never the subject of proper academic scholarship, so it was great to be able to do that research and provide that body of literature.”