The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened in Los Angeles on Tuesday, September 22, with more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space and about 1,200 works on display across roughly 30 galleries. George Lucas, 82, has spent 60 years assembling roughly 40,000 works and has never sold a single item from the collection. The scale is absurdly grand. The access, less so.
The museum sits in Exposition Park in the deep south of Southern California, on what used to be a concrete parking lot next to the century-old Coliseum, which will host its third Olympic Games in 2028. A building that took nearly a decade to build now rises over a 4.5-hectare park planted with 300 trees, including pines and jacarandas. It has four legs, two wings and a vast skylight. It also has the familiar private-museum logic: a vast object built to house private ownership, then opened to the public on terms set from above.
A Private Archive, Publicly Framed
The building is over 300,000 square feet and includes two theaters with seating for 600, cafés, restaurants, a library and study areas. About 1,200 works are on display, some devoted to individual artists and most organized thematically around love, family, school, cinema, manga and photography. The grounds feature a dozen sculptures, including works by Fernando Botero, a Princess Leia, and one with Yoda and Grogu together. Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits sit alongside Beatrix Potter’s illustrations, the ships from the Star Wars saga, works by Andy Warhol, photos by Robert Capa and the original lion costume from The Wizard of Oz.
The museum’s CEO, the British-born Tracey Bates, said, "I think the Vatican is a great example," adding, "when you go to the Vatican and you are overwhelmed by it, it’s an incredible experience. You assume everybody gets to go, and one, they don’t, and I think we need to remember that. And two, you don’t see it close up. You see the glory of the Sistine Chapel, but you don’t see the story of the Sistine Chapel. So by it being so close to us, George is showing you the story. He’s telling us, Michelangelo is a renowned artist, but ultimately in his day he was an illustrator, so we should pay illustrators of our day the same credit."
That comparison lands with a thud. The Vatican is not just a museum in Bates’s telling; it’s a reminder that access is rationed, glory is curated, and the public gets the spectacle while the institution keeps the keys. The Lucas Museum, by her own description, wants to control not just what people see, but how they see it.
No Labels, No Argument
Bates said she has been CEO since January and had nearly seven years as a consultant to Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson. She said the couple have been shaping the museum idea for 20 years, with a collection Lucas began assembling 60 years ago. The fourth floor has roughly thirty galleries, including a room for Norman Rockwell with about 50 works, galleries devoted to N. C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Frank Frazetta, Thomas Hart Benton and Jessie Willcox Smith, and works by those artists elsewhere in the museum.
The cinema galleries feature Star Wars prominently, while Indy is represented only by a bronze statue. The saga includes original sketches and paintings, ships, costumes and props used in films across different decades. Nearby are paintings by Alphonse Mucha and Diego Rivera, an original Tintín by Hergé and a comic-style work by Pablo Picasso. Bates said, "We’re not bound by the same rules as a regular museum because we’ve built a museum, so the rules don’t exist, which has been really fun."
The museum has no wall labels. Bates said, "Yes, because we want to show the narrative in one frame, a story you can look at and understand. George was very conscious when working with the curatorial team that the art should speak," and added, "You go to a museum, you start reading about a piece and instantly your opinion of what you’re looking at changes. We’ve been very intentional about not doing that here. We want the image and the story in that image to be what you see and what you engage with. hould you want further understanding, we have provided a free access digital guide. You just point your phone at the image and the context."
So the museum strips away labels, then offers context through a digital guide. The message is neat: interpretation is permitted, but only after the image has done its work. The institution decides the frame. The visitor gets the frame, then the footnotes.
Murals, Borders and the Story They Keep
The fifth and top floor is dedicated to muralism. Lucas describes murals in the catalog as "among the oldest forms of narrative art" and says that "in a world saturated with fleeting digital images, murals offer a different tempo, require physical presence, anchor stories to specific places." There is a large reproduction of Diego Rivera’s work, and Bates said, "it wouldn’t be right for us to take the Diego Rivera from Mexico. It remains where it remains, but that story doesn’t get told." The floor also includes half a dozen original Banksy pieces from his walls and his stencils, and politically charged works such as Crash and Depression: Mexican Deportation and Red Fear and McCarthyism by Mexican-American Judith F. Baca, the mind behind The Great Wall of Los Angeles.
That line about Rivera matters. The museum can reproduce the story, but not move the original. It can stage the politics, but not escape the fact that ownership still decides what travels and what stays put. The same logic runs through the whole building: collect, frame, display, interpret, retain.
The building’s green terrace, skylights and park views sit one floor up, often closed for private events. Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, it was built with more than a thousand fiberglass panels by over 150 architects and engineers, using technology that did not exist until about a decade ago. The museum also includes a curved library with thousands of reference volumes on film and art, including 3,000 donated by actor Steve Martin, a dozen study rooms and two cinemas for documentaries and films about the works and creators on display and other programmed themes.
Bates said, "This was built for 100 years plus it is a work of art in itself, a sculpture," and added, "George has been building this for decades. I’ve had the pleasure of building it as a small cog for six and a half years. It will be thrilling to open the doors to the public. Because that is what a museum is for: for the people."
For the people, apparently, after decades of private accumulation, a monumental shell, and a curatorial system that decides what can be seen, how it can be seen, and when the terrace is closed for private events. The doors are open. The ownership never was.