The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art officially opened its doors to the public today, marking the culmination of a visionary cultural project years in the making. Located within a sprawling 11-acre site in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park, the institution’s striking, sculptural silhouette was designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects. The development of the landmark campus also features landscape architecture by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA, with Stantec serving as the executive architect for the massive undertaking.
The public opening follows a series of milestone events, including an exclusive Founding Members Preview held from September 5 to 11 to give early supporters a first look at the inaugural galleries. This was followed by a star-studded opening night on Saturday, September 19, which brought together celebrity co-chairs and prominent cultural figures to celebrate the launch of the museum. The institution was co-founded by legendary filmmaker and producer George Lucas alongside businesswoman and philanthropist Mellody Hobson.
Today’s grand opening aligns closely with a public announcement made by the institution nearly a year prior. However, the project itself has a much longer and deeply considered history. First approved by the Los Angeles City Council in 2017, the museum broke ground the following year with initial construction getting underway. While the opening was originally slated for 2025, the complex engineering and meticulous detailing required for the futuristic structure ultimately brought the completion date to late 2026.
Altogether, the museum comprises an expansive 300,000-square-foot structure integrated into the landscape. Within its sweeping boundaries, the facility houses dynamic exhibition galleries, two dedicated state-of-the-art theaters, a research library, a retail store, a café, a restaurant, and versatile event spaces. The building sits as the anchor of a broader 13-acre campus designed to serve as a vital community hub for learning, art, and public engagement right in the heart of Los Angeles.
The core mission of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is centered around the concept of narrative art—broadly defined as the art of telling stories through images. The institution aims to trace visual storytelling across diverse cultures and centuries, spanning everything from prehistoric cave paintings and classical murals to illustration, comic books, photography, and film. According to the museum, its collection is built on the premise of engaging audiences with the powerful stories embedded in visual media, works that give new form to myths and narratives that shape beliefs, communicate core human values, spark the imagination, and foster a sense of community.
The backbone of this expansive collection consists of more than 40,000 works gathered over five decades by George Lucas. Reflecting on the philosophy behind the institution, Lucas shared that the museum was created to honor humanity’s stories and the artists who illustrate them, noting that these creators have long connected modern imaginations with ancient emotions and shared beliefs.
Architecturally, Ma Yansong’s design conceives the museum as an organic, floating form set harmoniously within a public park. The building is lifted off the ground, a strategic design move intended to preserve sightlines, maintain a human scale at the street level, and free up the ground plane for public use. Central arched steel beams spanning 185 feet form a lifted public plaza that acts as a vast canopy. This open-air plaza provides access to tall-ceilinged north and south lobbies filled with natural light, while a central elliptical oculus creates a direct visual connection from the plaza straight up to the sky four stories above.
The lower floors accommodate a variety of public amenities, including two 299-seat theaters, a horseshoe-shaped library and learning space featuring floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto the park, ten studio and classroom spaces, a museum shop, a café, and roughly 100,000 square feet of gallery space. Vertical circulation is highlighted by five public elevators on the north side, three of which are cylindrical and enclosed in glass shafts that transport visitors from the north lobby directly to the fourth-floor galleries. These upper galleries span approximately 82,000 square feet and are organized along a continuous, fluid circulation path. The fifth floor adds nearly 8,000 square feet of gallery space beneath a sculpted ceiling, alongside a major event space and a restaurant featuring indoor seating and an outdoor terrace known as the Skywalker Grill.
The building’s futuristic form is engineered to cantilever dramatically beyond its primary ground supports, creating the illusion that the structure is hovering above the park. Its undulating exterior is clad in more than 1,271 uniquely shaped panels of fiberglass-reinforced polymer, selected for its ability to form smooth, curved surfaces while maintaining a relatively low structural weight. These curved panels measure roughly 8 by 32 feet on average and were produced using an advanced digital and robotic fabrication process, then hand-finished to ensure uniform color and smoothness. Joint lines between the panels vary in width and orientation to gracefully follow the complex geometry of the building. An architectural ribbon of glass fiber-reinforced concrete runs along the park edges, complementing a material palette that includes exposed concrete, steel, glass, and plaster. The realization of this complex design required a dedicated team of more than 150 architects, engineers, and designers collaborating through advanced cloud-based modeling systems.
The surrounding 13-acre campus, designed by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA, transforms a former asphalt parking lot into a lush, drought-tolerant native landscape. The grounds feature more than 300 newly planted trees—including jacarandas, oaks, and pines—alongside sprawling meadows, native grasses, shrubs, and flowering plants. Visitors can also explore a hanging garden, an outdoor amphitheater, a waterfall-inspired fountain, and ten monumental outdoor sculptures installed along the campus walkways, serving as a free, accessible extension of the museum’s indoor galleries.
For its inaugural run, the museum’s exhibitions trace the expansive history of narrative art through approximately 1,300 works drawn from its permanent collection. The first floor houses The History of Narrative Art: Heroes · Myths · The Sacred, an exhibition that pairs signature pieces with digital and physical reproductions of immovable artworks, historical architecture, and archaeological sites. These were produced in collaboration with prestigious international institutions such as the Vatican Museums, the Louvre, and Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
On the upper levels, thematic galleries explore universal subjects such as love, family, and community, alongside dedicated spaces highlighting specific narrative genres like fantasy, romance, and adventure. Other galleries focus on distinct artistic mediums, including comic books, manga, graphic novels, photography, and murals, with several spaces paying tribute to twentieth-century illustrators. A dedicated cinema gallery presents the inaugural installation Star Wars in Motion, drawing directly from the extensive Lucas Archives. Additional gallery spaces feature an installation celebrating Ma Yansong’s architectural work with MAD and a fifth-floor exhibition centered on large-scale public murals.
The institution’s dynamic film program is housed within its two specialized venues: the Robert Flaherty Theater and the Slavko Vorkapich Theater. Designed as continuous, drop-in gallery experiences, both theaters allow visitors to enter and exit screenings freely, with programming ranging from short shorts to 90-feature films. The Robert Flaherty Theater honors the pioneering documentary filmmaker and focuses on cinema’s unique capacity to capture reality, screening films that tie directly into the museum’s inaugural exhibitions and the creative processes of the artists featured within them. The Slavko Vorkapich Theater takes its name from the experimental filmmaker and montage pioneer who chaired the University of Southern California’s Department of Film from 1948 to 1950—the very film school George Lucas later attended. This theater is dedicated to exploring the formal mechanics of filmmaking, including light, motion, sound, color, and editing.
The opening of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art coincides with a wave of significant cultural milestones across the international architectural and museum landscape. In Boston, construction is nearing completion on the William and Charlotte Bloomberg Public Science Common, a new venue at the Museum of Science designed by William Rawn Associates. In Sydney, Powerhouse Parramatta is preparing for its November opening on the banks of the Parramatta River, featuring inaugural exhibitions designed by OMA/AMO and Open Architecture. Meanwhile, Pelli Clarke & Partners has completed the Lola Mora Cultural Center in San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina, dedicated to the life and work of sculptor Lola Mora, and the Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art has officially opened on the shores of Jinji Lake as Bjarke Ingels Group’s first completed art museum.
