George Lucas’s Narrative Art Museum Set to Open in LA in 2026

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will open its doors to the public on September 22, 2026, in Los Angeles, filmmaker George Lucas and financier Mellody Hobson announced as they released the first completed photographs of the finished building. Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD in partnership with Stantec, the five-story structure spans 300,000 square feet on a 13-acre campus inside Exposition Park, built on ground once covered by an asphalt parking lot that has now given way to more than 300 newly planted trees.

Lucas, who founded the institution with Hobson, described the collection as a way of honoring image-makers who have long been treated as separate from fine art. “The artists in this collection didn’t just create images, they connected our modern imaginations with our ancient emotions,” he said, adding that the works “deserve to be in a museum.” He framed the project’s broader purpose around the power of illustrated storytelling itself: “Stories are mythology, and when illustrated, they help humans understand the mysteries of life.” Hobson called the result “a museum of the people’s art,” one meant to mirror the everyday experiences of the people who walk through it.

At opening, more than 1,300 works will be spread across over thirty galleries, taking up roughly 100,000 square feet of the building. The collection deliberately mixes categories: paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi and Frida Kahlo will hang near comics, illustration, murals, photography and material drawn from the full Lucas Archives.

A building without straight lines

Ma Yansong conceived the structure as a continuation of the tree canopy already covering Exposition Park, with a long form that touches the ground only at select points, leaving a sheltered plaza beneath the galleries. A central arch stretches 185 feet between the north and south lobbies, topped by an elliptical oculus that opens four stories up toward the sky.

No part of the exterior relies on a straight edge. More than 1,200 individually shaped panels of fiberglass-reinforced polymer, a lightweight cladding material, wrap the building’s continuous pale surface; a team of over 150 specialists worked out the fabrication methods required to build it. Inside, the same curved logic carries through to a tall white lobby where cylindrical glass elevators rise through the open volume and gallery entrances curve directly into the walls.

Landscape architects Mia Lehrer and Studio-MLA shaped the surrounding grounds into rolling landforms inspired by California’s foothills, mesas and canyons, threading in a hanging garden, an amphitheater, open meadow and a waterfall-like fountain planted with native and drought-tolerant species. Ten large-scale sculptures dot the free public park, including Fernando Botero’s bronze Maternity alongside figures pulled from the Lucas collection such as Leia, Yoda and Grogu, plus tributes to Rosie the Riveter, Emiliano Zapata, Eadweard Muybridge and stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien.

What visitors will see at opening

The ground-floor exhibition, The History of Narrative Art: Heroes, Myths, The Sacred, places original pieces beside highly detailed reproductions of works and sites that cannot travel, among them the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Winged Human-Headed Bulls from Sargon II’s palace, paintings from the Altamira caves and Mexico’s Aztec Sun Stone, all produced from high-resolution photography and 3D scanning shared with the partner institutions.

Upper floors organize the collection around themes such as family, labor and adventure, with rooms devoted to Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Frank Frazetta and Thomas Hart Benton alongside work by Vincent van Gogh, Jacob Lawrence and Charles White. Separate galleries cover comics, manga, graphic novels and mural traditions, including material from Judith F. Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles and newly acquired pieces from Banksy’s studio going on public view for the first time. A dedicated Star Wars in Motion exhibition traces land vehicles from the saga’s first six films, running from Luke’s Landspeeder to the earliest physical build of General Grievous’s Wheel Bike. Ma Yansong himself is the subject of an installation examining his design process through drawings and models.

Two continuous-format theaters, named for documentarian Robert Flaherty and film theorist Slavko Vorkapich, will run drop-in programs on cinema history and technique. A free horseshoe-shaped research library holds more than 30,000 comic books, nearly 2,900 volumes from Joseph Campbell’s personal library bearing his own annotations, and roughly 3,000 art books donated by Steve Martin and Ann Martin. At the top of the building, the Rockwell Group-designed Skywalker Grill, finished in cherrywood and illuminated onyx surfaces, will operate on its own hours independent of the galleries below.

With the building now complete and photographed, the museum’s remaining work turns to installing its opening exhibitions ahead of the September 2026 debut.