Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

If you haven’t heard of George Lucas, I know you have heard about his movies, such as the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises.

Last month he opened his long-awaited $1 billion, 300,000-square-foot museum in Los Angeles. I was frustrated that it had not opened when we were in LA a few months ago. In case you are worried about his spending too much, his net worth is estimated at 5 billion, and when he is not working on his museum, he manages the George Lucas Family Foundation and the George Lucas Educational Foundation, dedicating billions to educational equity, childhood development, and cultural causes. I wish we had more billionaires interested in helping others as opposed to just themselves!

Ever since Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Guggenheim in New York, a museum building itself has become the first artwork that introduces us to the institution. One might guess that the first thing that goes through the mind of the architect selected would be the purpose of the museum, though that has not always been so. In the case of the Lucas, we know the founder’s purpose was storytelling, and he made sure his architect conveyed his sense of adventure and science fiction.

A recent New York Times article headline was, “The Lucas Museum Architect Wants to Help You Escape From Reality: Ma Yansong, China’s reigning starchitect, lets his buildings wrapped in nature do the shouting.” What could better set up could there be to our vision of George Lucas’ movies.

Jessica Gelt, writing in the Los Angeles Times, described the building, “Rising like a spaceship over Exhibition Park pairs Ma Yansong’s futuristic form with 11 acres parkland, Star Wars statues, a cooling waterfall and an outdoor amphitheater.” Here is a rendering of the building and its surroundings.

A brief tour of some of the 100,000 square feet of the exhibition space, which includes a library plus film archive and restaurant, and no doubt plenty of storage space for the museum’s founding collection of 40,000 works of art.

https://www.tiktok.com/@bbkiyoshi/video/7681349972867992845 is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc

Lucas has collected narrative art for the past 50 years, focusing on popular illustration, comic art, paintings, and cinematic history, all telling a story in visual terms. The better-known artists in the collection include Frida Kahlo, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, Robert Colescott, Banksy, and Norman Rockwell. An emblematic work is Rockwell’s 1951 painting “Saying Grace” that Lucas acquired for $46 million dollars in 2013 at Sotheby’s.

My wife and I spend a lot of time discussing museum exhibitions and how they are organized since, as a curator, she has created so many. I like the Lucas Museum concept of arranging galleries by subject and story matter, as opposed to by artist, nationality, or other criteria.

Of course, there is a Star Wars exhibit, but there are many other stories represented from caveman to human myths and on throughout history, and I, for one, look forward to seeing the entire Lucas presentation.