With just under five months to go before its September opening, the forthcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles has announced a selection of exhibitions that will inaugurate the new institution, all of which are curated by cofounder George Lucas. The initial hang of the Lucas Museum will feature around 12,000 objects, drawn from the museum’s holdings of more than 40,000 objects, that Lucas began collecting over 50 years ago. They will be spread across 30 galleries in the museum’s 300,000-square-foot building, which sits on the edge of LA’s Exposition Park and includes an 11-acre campus. Related Articles Collector Julia Stoschek Closes Down Berlin Exhibition Venue After 10 Years In Favor of International Projects Top Collector John Phelan Fired as Navy Secretary, After Reports of Pentagon Infighting In its announcement Thursday, the Lucas has revealed the thematic compositions of the majority of these galleries, which range from focuses on specific artists to medium-specific hangs. Artists that Lucas has deep holdings of, like Thomas Hart Benton, Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, and Maxfield Parrish, will get their own galleries, as will illustrators like Frank Frazetta and Jessie Willcox Smith, the sole woman to get such treatment. Other rooms will be dedicated to architecture, cinema, photography, muralism, comics and graphic stories, magna and anime, and children’s stories. The cinema section will draw from the Lucas Archives’ holdings of production designs, costumes, and props, while the muralism section will feature preparatory sketches by artists like Judith F. Baca, Diego Rivera, and JR. Documentary images by Robert Capa, Gordon Parks, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Dorothea Lange will make-up the photography section. Two larger themes will take over a series of galleries that will explore subsections within those areas of study. “Everyday life,” for example, will look at “Childhood,” “Motherhood,” “Love,” and “Play,” among others, while “Narrative Forms” will be broken up into “Adventure,” “Fantasy,” “Romance,” and “Science Fiction.” Looking more broadly are galleries for “Western Stories,” which a release describes as focusing on “myths of the American West, including wagon trains, shoot-outs, frontier towns, and more”; “History,” featuring “paintings, prints, and illustrations telling (and pointedly re-telling) the stories of major historical events”; and “Civic Life,” with “artists’ portrayals of experience in the courthouse, the polling place, the political headquarters, and more.” “Contemporary vehicles of visual storytelling such as illustration, comics, and graphic stories have not always received the respect they deserve,” a press release reads about this initial hang. “The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art creates a home for what George Lucas has called ‘the people’s art.’” The installation strategy is similar to that of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which also bills various of its permanent collection galleries as standalone galleries, as well as the recently opened Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which featured 78 thematic sections across its 110,000 square feet of exhibition space. That Lucas is being billed as the curator for each of these galleries speaks to the larger leadership changes that he has implemented at the museum in the past year. In February 2025, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the museum’s director and CEO, stepped down as Lucas said that the role managing the museum’s “content direction” would now be handled by Lucas himself. Then in November, Lucas Museum chief curator Pilar Tompkins Rivas also departed the institution. Between those two departures, the museum also laid off 15 employees, or about 14 percent of its full-time staff, with cuts primarily impacting its Learning & Engagement and Museum Services teams.
