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The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a New Endeavor From the Creator of ‘Star Wars,’ Is a Story in Itself
Almost two decades in the making, the institution centers on art that shapes our everyday lives and reveals the craft behind it
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The new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles is full of unexpected juxtaposition. Just outside an exhibition on children’s stories housing works by Beatrix Potter, E.H. Shepard and Maurice Sendak stands a brand-new Banksy piece depicting a murderous lion, for example. In another part of the five-story building, a Frida Kahlo self-portrait hangs in view of Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s oil-on-canvas depicting dogs playing poker as well as the Batman suit from The Dark Knight.
All these pieces, however, fall under what museum founder and Star Wars creator George Lucas calls “narrative art,” or works that tell stories through images. Ryan Linkof, the museum’s senior curator and head of film programs, described it as “the visual culture we consume every day.” Lucas, who also created the Indiana Jones franchise and founded the studio Lucasfilm, defines it as the people’s art, or artwork that “creates a group of people with a common belief system.”
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Over 15 years in the making
The road to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opening on September 22 is a story in itself. Since at least 2010, Lucas had sought a home for the project in San Francisco, specifically the land near the Golden Gate Bridge managed by the Presidio Trust. The Trust rejected Lucas’ proposal in February 2014, and he and his wife, Mellody Hobson, turned to Chicago as a new potential location. The Chicago effort, championed by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, fell apart in June 2016. Los Angeles’ mayor at that time, Eric Garcetti, also wooed Lucas, with the city signing a deal in January 2017 to have the museum built on a strip of parking lot in Exposition Park.
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It took nine more years for the Lucas Museum to open its doors. Seated on a 13-acre campus, the 300,000-square-foot building includes over 30 galleries featuring approximately 1,200 works, most of them from Lucas’ founding collection of 40,000 items. “I bought art that moved me—with little concern for other’s opinions,” he explains in the Piccolo edition of Taschen’s Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. “To me, art is a personal experience, unrelated to cost or celebrity.” As such, he’s never sold a piece he’s purchased, and his collection includes Japanese manga alongside works by Frank Frazetta, Georges Méliès, Dorothea Lange and many others. Lucas acknowledges his varied and vast collection “spans genres, media and time.” But to him, the works have one key thing in common: “They deserve to be in a museum.”
The museum holds exhibitions on the fourth floor, has a gallery on murals on the fifth floor along with a restaurant, and includes a research library open to the public, an immersive “History of Narrative Art” show on the first floor, and two movie theaters continuously playing documentaries and experimental short films dedicated to the art of cinema.
Making this museum a reality, Lucas said during a press event at the museum in early September, was a trial for him. The rejected proposals in both San Francisco and Chicago involved years of expense and effort, and some critics were skeptical about having a museum dedicated to these artists in the first place.
“Part of the problem is I’m a contrarian,” the filmmaker said. “I don’t like to do things that people think can be done. … This one almost broke my will, but the great people that we assembled to do this have been a big advantage. We still had to deal with bureaucracies and people who have contrary thinking, but we managed to make our way through all that. So this is a big celebration for us, because it’s taken so long to get here.”
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A personal journey with no hierarchies, and little guidance
Speaking of contrary thinking, for Lucas, the type of groupings that involve placing that Kahlo next to Batman were always part of the plan. “The vision from George has always been to break down more classic hierarchies,” says Lucas Museum CEO Tracey Bates, adding that the goal for the institution has always been to “surprise and delight people [all] around, so that they can find their own path, their own journey.”
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The Lucas Museum doesn’t offer a guide to visitors on what to see first or what works are displayed where. There’s no pamphlet to tell you where to find David Hockney, or where Norman Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With, a piece on loan from the Norman Rockwell Museum depicting federal marshals escorting 6-year-old Ruby Bridges to a newly desegregated New Orleans school, is displayed.
That lack of guidance is intended as an invitation for exploration meant to encourage a “spark of inspiration,” as Bates described it in her opening remarks at the press event.
The setup has the Lucas Museum balancing on a taut wire between curation and free exploration. Most of the 30-plus galleries are loosely organized around themes like love, community, history and play. A few collections focus on a specific artist—such as N.C. Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish—while others showcase a specific medium like manga, comics and graphic stories. But the rest is left up to the visitor.
“If you have it too curated, so to speak, then you’re imposing a story,” explains Deepak Sarma, a religious studies scholar at Case Western Reserve University with curatorial experience, who was not involved with the Lucas Museum. “If you’re imposing it, some people are reluctant to embrace that. But on the other hand, if you’re too free-flowing, then it becomes like an un-curated acid trip.”
The Lucas Museum isn’t the first institution in L.A. to adopt this unguided approach. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new David Geffen Galleries has a similar setup: Its galleries are organized by geography with no set path to follow. Other experiences in the city and around the country have also experimented with this type of curation, or lack thereof. The Butter Fine Art Fairs, weekend-long exhibitions across the country that highlight the artistry of the African diaspora, with works from both emerging and established artists, have also considered this format.
“[This general approach] affords the viewer a better opportunity to be involved with the work,” says Butter co-founder Alan Bacon. “Sometimes didactics can lead you down a pathway mentally that’s absolutely correct, and a lot of that is from the artist. But there’s this certain level of curiosity that is natural within human nature that we want to explore.”
“You really are only left with the artwork,” adds Mali Bacon, Butter’s other co-founder. “You cannot be persuaded on the age of the art, the age of the artist, and the value [placed] on it.”
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The story of the work behind narrative art
Some areas in the Lucas Museum, however, demonstrate more intention than others. Unlike most of the other exhibitions, where art hangs upon blank white walls, vehicles from the Star Wars films pop against painted backdrops of alien landscapes, a treatment that Linkof says really drives home “the ways in which they’re an integrated part of the world of Star Wars.”
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The Rockwell gallery, found on the fourth floor right by the elevators, has pieces laid out to show not only the level of Rockwell’s craft, but also how popular art is iterated on by later artists who reimagine a work through a different lens.
This is most stark in the positioning of three pieces in the Rockwell space. The first two are versions of Rockwell’s The Runaway (1958); one is the draft done with graphite on paper, and the second is the final oil-on-canvas painting. The third is by Richard Williams. Created in 2014-15, it’s titled The Militarization of the Police Department—Deadly Force, and it brings a different perspective to the scene of a police officer talking to a small boy. “When you juxtapose images from a similar narrative together as with Rockwell, then you force people to talk about these differences,” says Sarma.
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Even in the other galleries, a curatorial nudge invites viewers to examine the detail and care that went into a piece of work. Viewers can get close to the art and take in the individual strokes of Maurice Sendak’s hand in the pages of Where the Wild Things Are and read notes in the margins of a Peanuts comic.
“They are drawings that were the hand of a certain artist, but they were also part of a bigger editorial process, where people weighed in on it,” says Linkof, of the annotated comics. “It had to tell a certain story, it had to hit in certain beats, it had to be in a certain size in many cases. So, you can see the ways that artist had to work within certain constraints to create this image that is then disseminated all over the world.”
A piece of narrative art in its own right
The Lucas Museum and its surrounding campus also tell a story. The structure, and the parks and gardens around it, have “that same organic flow, which is the thread of storytelling throughout all the spaces,” explains Bates. “It’s not really even just about the art.”
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At the press event, the campus’s landscape architect Mia Lehrer explained that her team decided to “think of the visitor as a traveler.” She added that the campus gardens were designed without a single route in mind, and that she and her team were inspired by California’s mountains, foothills, valleys, mesas, canyons, meadows, streams and rivers. They looked “to the way topography, planting and light can change the feeling of a place as you move through it.”
Ma Yansong, the architect of the building, which appears to float in front of the Downtown L.A. skyline, said in his remarks that he wanted to “make people curious.”
He added that he didn’t “want to tell [people] what this is about,” but he did share that the structure is a nod to clouds and tree canopies, not the starship that many imagine when they first see the building.
“We wanted to become part of the neighborhood,” says Bates, adding that there is and was a strong drive to enter into “the story of our ZIP code.” As part of that effort, the museum offers anyone in the shared South Los Angeles ZIP code of 90037 a free museum pass for them and a guest.
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The throughline throughout the entire campus, however, is Lucas’ belief in the importance of narrative art to culture not only at this moment, but also across history. That belief was instilled in him when he was in college and met mythologist and storyteller Joseph Campbell, who became a mentor to him and, as Lucas explains in Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, “imbued my lifelong interest in mythology.”
Those myths, Lucas believes, are universal. “Proto-scientific stories always included mythologies—‘why stories’ that decoded the origins of mankind and the environment,” Lucas adds. “They both reflected and connected society with a common belief. In conveying values, they helped hold together a village … then a city … then a nation.”
Lucas, perhaps the most influential storyteller of our time, is uniquely equipped to create a museum that explores and celebrates that concept.
“There are very few stories that so clearly touch our hearts as the first Star Wars,” says Sarma, about the films where an unexpected hero overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds and defeats an evil menace. “I think that there are very few people in history who can talk and think about the universal story. And he’s one of them.”
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