After several delays, George Lucas’s legacy project is finally ready to open. There’s less “Star Wars” than you might expect.
Matt Stevens and Robin Pogrebin
It has been almost a decade in the making, but details about the new museum founded by the “Star Wars” creator George Lucas were long as closely guarded as Darth Vader’s true identity.
Among the most important questions: What exactly constitutes a museum of narrative art?
“A museum focused on storytelling in all its forms,” Tracey Bates, the museum’s chief executive, said in a recent interview.
“Narrative art is the universal art of storytelling through images. It’s existed throughout our lifetime,” she added. “Storytelling has always existed. We’re just now a museum that is platforming and showing that.”
After repeated delays and considerable staff turnover, the project is finally ready — as Hollywood says — for its close-up. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, set on 13 acres in Exposition Park in South Los Angeles, will open on Sept. 22 at an estimated cost of more than $1 billion, all of it provided by Lucas himself.
The director, 82, had made clear his intention to get it done during his lifetime. And now he has.
To get the obvious question out of the way — is this just a museum of “Star Wars” stuff? — the answer is that Lucas’s cultural juggernaut of a film franchise makes up only about seven percent of the museum’s gallery space. That said, an enormous Naboo N-1 Starfighter does greet visitors in one of the lobbies. And fans can encounter Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder in the cinema gallery and a statue of Yoda atop a fountain in the gardens.
The rest of the museum’s content is largely 20th-century American art organized into broad categories like “family,” “work” and “sports.” There are Norman Rockwell scenes of everyday life; a Pikachu from Pokémon; art from the world of fantasy (“The Lord of the Rings” to Conan the Barbarian); and an entire gallery of graphic art and comic book images.
Also on display is a strip of “Alley Oop,” a comic about a time-traveling cave man; it’s the first artwork Lucas ever acquired. Lucas so reveres comic strips that the filmmaker once tried to make a version of the comic “Flash Gordon,” explained the senior curator, Ryan Linkof. But someone else got the rights, he said, so Lucas made “Star Wars.”
In the lead-up to the museum’s opening, Lucas and Mellody Hobson, his wife and business partner, have been loath to discuss details of the museum’s contents, and Lucas declined to be interviewed for this article.
But along the way they have made clear their general goals: to emphasize storytelling and to highlight illustration, an area often overlooked — and in their view undervalued — by the art world.
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“For thousands of years, narrative art has illustrated our myths — the stories we believe that are not necessarily true, but that give us meaning, purpose and a sense of community,” Hobson said in a statement to The New York Times on Tuesday. “Our goal is to create a museum that celebrates illustrators and the art that shows us who we are.”
Lucas’s phrase for what he hopes to display is “the people’s art,” and in walking the halls, one can see disparate examples of that, such as a painting by Frida Kahlo juxtaposed with a pop culture artifact like Christian Bale’s Batman suit from “The Dark Knight.”
While some of the artists featured at the museum are household names, many of the illustrators and artists are not included in leading institutional collections.
The inaugural exhibitions at the Lucas Museum include more than 1,300 objects installed across 33 galleries that occupy about 100,000 square feet — not gargantuan but in the upper ranks of museums for sheer size. The ground floor sets the tone with a “history of narrative art” starting with a light-box projection of prehistoric paintings from the Altamira cave in northern Spain and a digital reproduction of the Sistine Chapel.
The fourth floor, home to most of the museum’s galleries, includes book illustrations by N.C. Wyeth, several works by Maxfield Parrish and a room filled with manga that has a full, 43-piece comic that reads right to left along a sweeping curved wall.
The fifth floor is devoted to large-scale public art and murals by the likes of the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, the activist painter Judith F. Baca and the French street artist JR.
Given the widespread and enduring love of all things “Star Wars,” the museum is likely to become a popular destination, but it has also elicited a robust amount of skepticism. As early as 2017, Christopher Knight, the former art critic for The Los Angeles Times, declared the museum “a terrible idea” with a “dubious artistic mission.”
The Lucas Museum takes pride in being more user-friendly than esoteric — fun as well as serious. Bates said the museum was appealing to a universal love of storytelling in all its forms, and added that the mix of work on display “is what makes us really special.”
“I don’t think we’d ever want to apologize for feeling more accessible,” Bates said. The whole idea, she added, is to “create a lot of art lovers.”
Though initial plans to build it in San Francisco and Chicago were foiled, the Lucas Museum now seems to have the wind at its back in Los Angeles. Momentum is already building around the 2028 Olympics here and the museum’s location in Exposition Park — already home to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the California African American Museum, the California Science Center and a Metro stop — is likely to help draw tourists and locals alike.
Visitors will find museum grounds that feature verdant parks and gardens, designed by Studio-MLA and the landscape architect Mia Lehrer, as well as 10 large outdoor sculptures. One depicts the impressively gelatinous “Star Wars” character Jabba the Hutt being vanquished by the diminutive, if formidable Princess Leia.
In an interview, Lehrer described how her team created meandering pathways and changing topography to surprise visitors as they round each corner. The landscaping is designed to mirror Southern California’s Mediterranean biome in its planting selections. Jacarandas and bougainvilleas — Lucas’s favorites — were a must, she said.
The building itself is also an attraction — a sprawling, spaceshiplike structure designed by Ma Yansong of the architecture studio MAD (with the company Stantec as the architect of record). It features an elliptical oculus and glass elevator tubes suggestive of a futuristic movie.
Ma said in an interview that he was inspired by tree canopies and clouds, and that he sought to design a building that would respond to Hobson’s interest in inspiring young people.
“Curiosity,” he said. “Architecture has to attract people to explore.”
The museum joins several other building projects that have raised the city’s cultural profile, namely the $724 million Geffen Galleries, which opened this year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Dataland, a museum highlighting A.I.-generated art; and the Academy Museum dedicated to the movies.
The Lucas Museum’s campus includes a research library; two theaters; and a rooftop restaurant called Skywalker Grill, which offers a burger made with Wagyu beef from Skywalker Ranch, Lucas’s compound in Marin County, Calif.
And then, of course, there is the gift shop, where 25-cent pencils can be sharpened down from “1st Draft” to “FINAL DRAFT” by would-be screenwriters. The collectible hand-painted porcelain cookie jar in the mold of R2-D2 retails for $210.
Gift shop proceeds will help generate revenue for the museum, along with admission fees of $25 for adults and membership packages starting at $140.
Such charges have drawn some criticism, but Bates said the museum — which would not disclose its annual operating budget — “has to be self-sustaining” if it wanted to “outlive its founders.”
Still to be seen is whether critics will come to embrace the museum as a professional cultural institution or dismiss it as Lucas’s vanity project. While its former director, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, was hired away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to broaden the Lucas’s scope beyond Lucas, she departed last year in a move that was framed as a resignation.
Lucas installed himself as the head of “content direction” and named Jim Gianopulos, a former movie studio executive and Lucas Museum trustee, as interim chief executive.
Jackson-Dumont’s exit was accompanied by several other senior leadership departures — including the chief financial officer, the general counsel, the head of development, the director of exhibitions as well as the heads of information technology, security and education.
Bates stepped in as chief executive in January, having advised the museum as a consultant over the last six years.
She downplayed the staff turnover. Lucas, she said, “has always been the chief curator.” She added that “the planning, the mission, vision and values of this organization have never changed.”
Some of those values are evident in a gallery devoted to illustrations from children’s books. The Cowardly Lion stands in the middle of the room, brave and tall, near drawings of Winnie-the-Pooh and creatures from Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are.”
Bates calls this one of her favorite, most emotional spaces in the museum. It is in the pages of storybooks, she said, where we learn “things aren’t hiding in our cupboards” and where our relationship with art so often begins.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
