Eighteen Days Until the Lucas Museum Opens the Door on Narrative Art

The countdown is finally short enough to measure in days. On Sept. 22, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will open to the public in Los Angeles's Exposition Park, bringing George Lucas and Mellody Hobson's long-developing museum project out of renderings, construction photographs and future-tense announcements and into the ordinary test that eventually faces every cultural institution: people walking through the doors.

The scale is immediately newsworthy. The museum's 300,000-square-foot building, designed by Ma Yansong of MAD with Stantec, contains more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space across more than 30 galleries. The opening installations will present more than 1,300 works from a permanent collection that the museum says includes more than 40,000 objects. Outside, landscape architect Mia Lehrer and Studio-MLA have transformed the surrounding site into a 13-acre park and garden campus, replacing what had once been an asphalt lot with a public landscape tied directly to Exposition Park.

There will be obvious attention around the Lucas name and around Star Wars, particularly the inaugural cinema exhibition Star Wars in Motion, which will display vehicles, props, costumes and design work from the first six films. But treating the institution as a very elaborate Star Wars museum would miss the larger proposition. The Lucas Museum is opening as a museum of narrative art, a category broad enough to place ancient sacred images, Renaissance painting, magazine illustration, comic art, children's-book imagery, photography, murals and cinema inside the same conversation.

A museum built around the story, not the hierarchy

That organizing principle is what gives the opening meaning beyond the size of the building. Most museums sort art through categories that visitors already recognize: painting, sculpture, photography, antiquities, contemporary art. The Lucas Museum begins with another question entirely: what images have people used to tell stories, preserve beliefs, build heroes, explain families, invent worlds and persuade one another about what matters?

The first-floor exhibition The History of Narrative Art: Heroes, Myths, The Sacred makes that argument explicitly. The museum says the gallery will move across tens of thousands of years of visual storytelling, using original works alongside highly faithful reproductions of immovable art, architecture and archaeological sites. Other galleries are organized around subjects such as love, family, community, childhood, work, play, sports and adventure rather than treating popular illustration or comic art as a lesser category that must justify its presence beside older forms.

That is not simply a curatorial gimmick. It is an institutional statement about what counts as culturally consequential imagery. A Norman Rockwell illustration, a comic page, a movie costume and an older canonical painting may have very different histories, materials and markets, but each can shape the stories people carry into the world. The museum's test will be whether placing them together produces genuine interpretation rather than a very large collection of recognizable things.

Cinema without a showtime

The museum is also extending the gallery idea into film. Two dedicated theaters - the Robert Flaherty Theater and the Slavko Vorkapich Theater, will run continuous programs throughout the day, allowing visitors to enter and leave as they would a gallery rather than organize a museum visit around a conventional screening time. The inaugural program ranges from early silent film and documentary to animation and avant-garde work, treating cinema both as narrative and as a technology that changed how images could move.

That drop-in model quietly matters. We have recently been looking at new ways audiences consume art, from immersive documentary environments to virtual heritage and extended-reality exhibitions. The Lucas Museum belongs near that conversation, but it approaches the problem from another direction. Instead of replacing the museum room with a headset or turning the archive into an immersive simulation, it expands what the museum room is allowed to contain. A film can operate like a gallery. A comic can sit inside a history of visual mythology. A reproduction can provide access to something that cannot physically be moved. The experiment is less about abandoning the museum than stretching its definition.

The building is part of the argument

The architecture is difficult to separate from that ambition. Ma Yansong's building curves above Exposition Park with a form that has already drawn comparisons to a spacecraft, although the museum's own framing is more terrestrial: a sculptural structure integrated into gardens, pathways and public space. The project sits among some of Los Angeles's most established cultural and civic institutions, including the Natural History Museum, California Science Center and Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

The surrounding landscape may prove as important to the museum's relationship with its neighborhood as the galleries themselves. The Lucas Museum has created the LM37 pass for residents of the surrounding 90037 ZIP code, providing free museum admission for the passholder and one guest. A neighborhood preview day on Sept. 13 will bring residents, students, local businesses and community partners inside before the general opening. Member previews begin Sept. 5, while a formal opening-night celebration is scheduled for Sept. 19.

That local-access effort matters because monumental museums do not arrive neutrally in city neighborhoods. They alter traffic, land use, tourism, employment and the cultural identity of the district around them. A park can be public in design and still feel like the front lawn of an institution unless local residents are given practical reasons to treat it as theirs. The museum's community programs will eventually have to be judged in use rather than announcement, but free local admission is at least a concrete starting point.

What visitors should know

General admission is $25 for adults and $21 for visitors 65 and older. Admission is free for children 17 and under, active-duty military, members and LM37 passholders, although every gallery visitor, including children and members, needs a timed-entry reservation. The museum will be closed Tuesdays. Friday and Saturday hours extend into the evening, and the public can visit the shop, cafe, Skywalker Grill restaurant, park, gardens and research library without a museum admission reservation.

The research library is another feature worth watching once the opening-day attention settles. It will be free to use and places scholarship beside spectacle in an institution whose collection includes some of the most commercially recognizable visual culture in the world. The success of a narrative-art museum cannot simply be measured by how many people photograph a familiar prop. The more interesting question is whether a visitor who comes for Star Wars leaves curious about illustration, muralism, comics, photography or the much older human habit of arranging pictures into meaning.

Eighteen days out

There is still plenty we cannot know before Sept. 22. A museum can describe its philosophy, publish its collection highlights and release beautiful photographs, but the actual institution only becomes legible when visitors begin moving through it. Which galleries hold people? Which combinations feel revelatory and which feel forced? Does the architecture help the collection or overwhelm it? Does a museum founded by one of the most influential storytellers in modern popular culture manage to become something larger than the biography of its founder?

Those are questions for the visit itself. The advance is simpler. Eighteen days from now, Los Angeles gets a new major museum, and the museum is making an unusually direct argument that the stories people encounter in comics, movies, illustrations, sacred imagery and popular culture deserve to be examined as part of one long human visual tradition.

That is ambitious enough without pretending we already know the verdict. The doors open Sept. 22. Then the story belongs to the rooms, the work and the people walking through them.

Event Details

What	Lucas Museum of Narrative Art public opening
When	Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2026; member previews begin Sept. 5; neighborhood preview Sept. 13; opening-night celebration Sept. 19
Where	Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, One Lucas Plaza, Exposition Park, Los Angeles, CA 90037
Admission	$25 adults; $21 ages 65+; free for children 17 and under, active-duty military, members and LM37 passholders; timed-entry reservation required for gallery visitors
Hours	Closed Tuesdays; Friday and Saturday hours extend into the evening
Also	Continuous film programs in two theaters; 13-acre park and gardens; shop, cafe, Skywalker Grill and research library accessible without a museum admission reservation

SOURCE NOTES

• Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — opening announcement
• Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — Plan Your Visit
• Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — exhibitions, film program and campus information