George Lucas has spent his career doing things people told him could not be done. Building his own museum may have been the hardest.
“This has been a long haul,” the 82-year-old filmmaker said Wednesday during a surprise appearance at a press preview of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. “Seventeen years between getting kicked out of cities and trying to get this built, which has in itself been eight years.
“Part of the problem is I’m a contrarian,” Lucas continued. “I don’t like to do things that people think can be done. I’m fascinated by doing things that people say can’t be done. And even when you do it, they say, ‘Well, that’s not any good. You can’t do that.’”
Then came his blunt assessment of the undertaking: “I’m used to doing the impossible. This one almost broke my will.”
The approximately $1 billion museum, co-founded by Lucas and his wife, business executive Mellody Hobson, opens to the public Sept. 22 in Exposition Park, across from Lucas’ alma mater, USC. Earlier attempts to build it in San Francisco and Chicago collapsed amid disputes over location, design and public land. Los Angeles was selected in 2017, and construction began the following year, only to encounter pandemic shutdowns and supply-chain delays.
“We still had to deal with bureaucracies and people who have contrary thinking,” Lucas said. “But we managed to make our way through all that.”
Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects with Stantec, the curving, elevated structure has been likened to a spaceship, a cloud and a tree canopy. The five-story, 300,000-square-foot building is surrounded by a 13-acre campus of gardens, paths and public gathering spaces designed by landscape architect Mia Lehrer. Inside are more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space, two theaters, a free research library, classrooms, a café and a rooftop restaurant called Skywalker Grill.
The inaugural displays comprise more than 1,300 objects drawn from a permanent collection of more than 40,000 works. They range from paintings by Frida Kahlo, Norman Rockwell, Jacob Lawrence and Charles White to comic art, children’s-book illustrations, movie posters, murals and pieces by Banksy and Frank Frazetta. (Works from Disney are notable absent.)
And, yes, there is Star Wars. The opening cinema exhibition, “Star Wars in Motion,” includes C-3PO, R2-D2, Darth Vader, Princess Leia’s costume, Luke Skywalker’s battered landspeeder and an enormous model of an Imperial AT-AT. Outside, a bronze sculpture depicts Leia confronting Jabba the Hutt. But the franchise occupies only a fraction of the museum, which Lucas has repeatedly described as a “temple to the people’s art.”
“This is a big celebration for us because it’s taken so long to get here,” Lucas said. “But it’s something that I felt very, very strongly about in terms of honoring illustrators, artists who illustrate stories that are already written. And most of the stories are myths. They’re not real. But the illustrations make them real.”
The museum rejects the customary separation between fine art and popular imagery. Its galleries are arranged around subjects such as love, family, work, childhood, sports, adventure, science fiction and community, placing familiar commercial artists alongside figures more commonly encountered in major art institutions.
For Lucas, the stakes go beyond elevating illustrators. He argued Wednesday that shared images and stories create the common beliefs that hold societies together.
“A picture is very powerful, and the stories are very powerful,” he said. “You combine them together, and those two elements create a society.
“Narrative art creates a group of people with common belief systems,” Lucas added. “And that common belief system allows them to work together, not kill each other, and do things that one person can’t do.”
Hobson characterized the institution in similarly populist terms, calling it “a museum by the people, for the people.” General admission will cost $25, while visitors 17 and younger will enter free. Residents of the surrounding 90037 ZIP code will be eligible for free admission through the museum’s LM37 pass.
Lucas ended his remarks with a characteristically wary acknowledgment of the reporters assembled before him.
“I know we have a tendency to draw in because I’m controversial in terms of the media,” he said. “But hey, I just do what I feel I have to do. And you guys do what you have to do. So I’ll just let it go at that.”
