The Creator of ‘Star Wars’ Loves Art That Tells a Story. Peek at the Collection of George Lucas’ New Museum Before It Opens This Fall
Adventure, comics, childhood, love and everyday life are among the dozens of themes that will guide the curation of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles
The Critics Corner, Ernie Barnes, 2007, will be on display when the museum opens.
Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
Ahead of Star Wars Day—May the 4th be with you—the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art offered its first glimpse at what visitors can expect to see when the Los Angeles institution opens its doors to the public for the first time in September.
In a video released last week, the museum teased the wide-ranging themes for the 35 galleries that will fill its 100,000 square feet of newly built exhibition space.
George Lucas wrote and directed the original Star Wars movie, which was released in 1977. The hit spawned decades of sequels, prequels and spin-offs. Lucas’ production studio also created the Indiana Jones films and a prestigious special effects workshop.
Aerial view of Lucas Museum of Narrative Art © 2025 Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Courtesy Hathaway Dinwiddie. By Pedro Ramirez
According to the website of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, the Star Wars creator’s passion for collecting began in college when he purchased an illustration of Alley Oop, the titular character of a 1930s comic strip about a time-traveling caveman. That foretold the future filmmaker’s enduring interest in creative works that use visuals to tell a story.
The museum, designed by architect Ma Yansong, looks unmistakably like a spaceship. It’s the culmination of years of collaboration between architects and the museum’s founders, who previously considered putting the museum in Chicago and San Francisco but encountered resistance in both of those cities.
In previewing the museum for an audience at Comic-Con in San Diego last summer, Lucas said, “This is sort of a temple to the people’s art,” reported Andrew Dalton for the Associated Press.
Themed galleries on childhood and children’s stories will feature Christopher Robin at the Enchanted Place, E.H. Shepard, 1928. Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
Several inaugural displays will be devoted to individual artists Lucas admires, whose artworks were pillars of 20th-century American culture. These include painters Norman Rockwell, whose artworks regularly adorned covers of the Saturday Evening Post magazine; Thomas Hart Benton, who captured the quotidian rhythm of the rural American Midwest; N.C. Wyeth, described in 1907 by Outing magazine as “one of our greatest, if not our greatest, painter of American outdoor life”; and Maxfield Parrish, whose artworks, known for their saturation, brought many children’s books to life.
Frank Frazetta, widely known as the “Godfather of fantasy art,” whose superhero and science fiction illustrations filled comic books, album covers and posters, will receive a gallery all to himself. Jessie Willcox Smith, celebrated for her illustrations that brought life to stories in magazines such as Harper’s and Scribner’s—including a long-running Mother Goose series and covers for Good Housekeeping—will also be featured in a standalone gallery.
For a Mile, or Thereabouts, My Raft Went Very Well, N.C. Wyeth, 1920, an illustration for Robinson Crusoe Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
Other spaces explore more open-ended themes that give a museum of loosely defined “narrative art” the license to push boundaries.
“No two pieces of narrative art are the same,” wrote ArtNet’s Tim Brinkhof about the genre in 2024. “While some depict entire stories from beginning to end, others focus on a specific scene that, in the eyes of the artist, encapsulates what the underlying story is about. Most narrative art, like most narratives, contain norms, values, and lessons that reflect the culture and time period of the artist.”
Mexican Stand-Off, Rafael Navarro, 2006, features in galleries devoted to comics, fantasy and graphic stories Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
Gallery themes include adventure and architecture, school and civic life, anime and manga, childhood and play, cinema and comics, community and everyday life, family and motherhood, fantasy and science fiction, western stories and history, love and romance, sports and work.
“The images are illustrations of beliefs we live with every day. For that reason, this art belongs to everyone,” Mellody Hobson, Lucas Museum co-founder, says in a statement. “Our hope is that as people move through the galleries, they will see themselves, and their humanity, reflected back.”
Fun fact: A smash success
When Star Wars debuted in 1977, it took in more than $2.5 million during its first six days in theaters—an impressive box office tally.
One space devoted to murals will feature works by Judith F. Baca, Diego Rivera, and JR, Art News’ Maximilíano Durón reports, while a photography gallery will be filled with the images captured by Robert Capa, Gordon Parks, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Dorothea Lange. The works of Beatrix Potter, Leo Politi, E.H. Shepard and Jacob Lawrence will feature in a display on children’s literature illustration, the Los Angeles Times’ Jessica Gelt reports.
Roughly 1,200 artworks will be on view in the museum when it opens, a fraction of the more than 40,000 items in the permanent collection. Only a bit of the museum will focus on Star Wars memorabilia, including props, costumes, production designs and vehicles, per the Times.