George Lucas's Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened in Los Angeles yesterday with more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space and about 1,200 works on display across roughly 30 galleries. The 82-year-old director and producer behind Star Wars and Indiana Jones has assembled a collection of roughly 40,000 works over 60 years and never sold a single item. 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 two years.
The building took nearly 10 years to build and almost ended up in Chicago. It's over 300,000 square feet and includes two theaters with seating for 600, cafés, restaurants, a library and study areas. The structure has four legs, two wings and a vast skylight, standing in a 4.5-hectare park planted with 300 trees, including pines and jacarandas. The public can view the collection starting yesterday.
What Private Capital Built
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 first hall explains the origins of narrative, focusing on heroes, myths and the sacred. It includes original pieces such as a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, along with copies and reproductions of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel and of Velázquez's Las Meninas. The museum's CEO, 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."
Bates has been CEO since January this year 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.
Breaking Museum Rules
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 works and galleries will rotate. 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. Should you want further understanding, we have provided a free access digital guide. You just point your phone at the image and the context."
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's 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.
Architecture and Access
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 didn't 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."
Why This Matters:
The Lucas Museum represents a model increasingly relevant in an era of constrained public budgets: privately funded cultural infrastructure with public access. Lucas assembled a 40,000-work collection over six decades without state subsidy or lottery funding, then built a 300,000-square-foot museum on reclaimed parking lot land. The institution doesn't rely on taxpayer support for operations or acquisitions. It demonstrates that private capital can deliver large-scale cultural projects when entrepreneurs retain control over vision and execution. The museum's rejection of traditional labeling and its use of digital guides reflects a market-responsive approach to visitor experience. For cities competing for cultural tourism—Los Angeles will host the Olympics in two years—privately funded museums offer civic amenity without long-term fiscal burden on municipal or state budgets.