After many years of delays, plans that changed, and public criticism, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is now on track to open. The $1B museum created by filmmaker George Lucas and investor Mel Odysseus Hobson is set to open in Los Angeles Exposition Park to the public on September 22, 2026.
The museum will welcome visitors into a space created to illustrate stories and visual narratives that are part of everyday life. Hobson has stated the purpose of the museum clearly in announcing its upcoming opening date: “This is a museum of the people’s art. The images we have in our minds today illustrate how we live our lives.” She continued, “For this reason, this art does belong to everyone.”
The museum will be located adjacent to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and will be approximately 300,000 square feet in size, with approximately 100,000 square feet of that space being used for Exhibition Galleries. The galleries will have a theme based on humanity and human values.
Lucas’s original vision for the museum included identifying the role that storytelling plays in connecting cultures and generations through time. “Stories are mythology, and by using illustrations, we can show how to interpret the mysteries of life. The Lucas Museum was created from a belief that illustrated storytelling is a universal language,” said Lucas.
That belief is reflected in the museum’s growing permanent collection of over 40,000 Works. The holdings in the museum represent a variety of different centuries and artistic styles, bringing together all forms of visual images, including fine art, illustrations, comic books, photography, and film artifacts. The artists included in the permanent collection include Norman Rockwell, Frida Kahlo, Jessie Willcox Smith, N. C. Wyeth, and John Tenniel, among others. Wyeth, Beatrix Potter, Judy Baca, Kadir Nelson, and Maxfield Parrish.
Comic books and graphic art represent another major segment of the museum’s collections, including works by Winsor McCay, Jack Kirby, Frank Frazetta, Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, and Robert Crumb. Gordon Parks, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Dorothea Lange provide a photographic perspective of visual storytelling.
Some of the pieces that will be featured in the museum’s opening include: Frazetta’s cover for the book “A Princess of Mars” from 1970, Rockwell’s “Age of Romance” for The Saturday Evening Post, an unpublished drawing by Beatrix Potter titled “Mouse with a spinning wheel” (1890), Wyeth’s “The Duel on the Beach” (1926) for Ladies’ Home Journal, and Ernie Barnes’ “The Critics Corner” (2007).
The building itself has a very high standard of ambition. Designed by Ma Yansong, the founder of MAD Architects, the building has been compared to an interstellar spacecraft. The lobby has three glass elevators and is located in the center of the structure, with two theaters and a very large introductory exhibition space on either side. On one side of the lobby is a café, while on the other side is a gift shop.
The galleries will be located on the fourth floor. The restaurant planned for the fifth floor is also envisioned as a destination restaurant delivering a fine dining experience. Oak View Group acts as the hospitality partner of the museum, and Rhubarb Hospitality Collection, a subsidiary of Oak View Group, manages all F&B for the museum. The company also operates venues at The Royal Albert Hall in London, as well as major performance venues across the USA.
The library is a key component of the museum’s research and academic mission. The library construction includes three levels with curved timber balconies, as well as curved timber walls. Tall arches allowed views of the surrounding park, which covers 11 acres.
The park is open to the public for walking and other activities from sunrise to sunset. Entry will not be required to the museum to access the paths that wind through the park and feature many native plants and over 200 newly-planted trees. There will be a garden installed on the roof of the museum, and while it will be accessible, visitors will not yet know the entry process.
Opening delays, changes in the staffing levels, and the overwhelming amount of public attention to the project have been a difficult road to travel. When the decision to locate the Museum in Los Angeles was made in 2017, after dropping plans for the Museum in San Francisco and Chicago, construction started in 2018 with a projected opening in 2021.
The pandemic of COVID-19 slowed progress on the Museum’s construction significantly and global supply chain issues later caused delays in securing materials to build the Museum. Therefore, the originally expected opening of the Museum was moved to 2023, then 2025, and finally to the current expected opening in 2026.
Staffing issues have only added to the problem. Sandra Jackson-Dumont stepped down from her position as Director and Chief Executive Officer in March 2025. The museum’s leadership says the management structure will be changing and will consist of a Lucas Museum Chief Executive Officer and Lucas Museum Director of Content, Jim Gianopulos, former Chairman of 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures. The museum stated that they would find a CEO once a direction for that position has been established.
The museum also let go of 15 full-time education and public programming employees and seven part-time employees in late May 2025. At the time, the museum stated, “Education is one of the Lucas Museum’s many pillars”, indicating that there will be classrooms designed into the museum.
More recently, in December 2025, Chief Curator Pilar Tompkins-Rivas left her position after five years with the Lucas Museum. The museum has no current plans to fill that vacancy, but has expressed appreciation for all the work she did in preparing the Museum’s Collection for opening. Lucas will remain in charge of the museum’s curatorial direction.
Lucas and the museum have taken the project on the road to build buzz. In July 2025, Lucas appeared at San Diego International Comic-Con for the first time, joining a panel with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, Star Wars production designer Doug Chiang, and moderator Queen Latifah. Lucas said the museum would aim to elevate the status of comic art and magazine illustration by becoming “a temple to the people’s art.”
The tour continued in October 2025 at New York Comic Con, where the museum hosted a panel moderated by Martin Scorsese and featuring fantasy artists Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, best known for their iconic paintings and posters.
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