George Lucas Curates About 20 Inaugural Exhibitions for Museum Opening
George Lucas is opening his museum with about 20 inaugural exhibitions and more than 1,200 objects on view. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will bring that lineup to the public on Sept. 22.
The scale is unusually large for a first launch: more than 30 galleries, more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space and a founding collection of more than 40,000 works. For readers tracking museum debuts as cultural bets, that puts this opening in the category of an institution trying to make a statement before the doors even swing fully open.
Lucas Museum gallery plan
Thursday’s announcement set out the inaugural exhibitions George Lucas curated for the 300,000-square-foot museum in Los Angeles' Exposition Park. The list includes a show on the architecture of the building, plus theme-driven exhibitions that focus on myths about love, family, community and adventure.
One exhibition, Everyday Life, is built around visual stories about childhood, community, family, love, motherhood, play, school, sports and work. Another, Civic Life, looks at artists’ portrayals of experience in the courthouse, the polling place and the political headquarters. A third, Narrative Forms, spans adventure, fantasy, romance and science fiction.
Star Wars display alone
Only one of the inaugural exhibitions is tied to cinema, and it centers on Star Wars memorabilia. That display will include large-scale vehicle installations, production designs, props and costumes, which means the movie material arrives as one part of a much broader narrative-art program rather than the museum’s main identity.
The rest of the opening emphasizes comics, illustration, children’s literature and paintings. The museum will show work by Beatrix Potter, Leo Politi, E.H. Shepard and Jacob Lawrence, along with comics and graphic stories by Mœbius, Marie Severin, Jack Kirby, Alison Bechdel, Jim Lee, Frank Miller and Rafael Navarro.
Exposition Park scale
The museum was co-founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, designed by Ma Yansong of Mad Architects with executive architect Stantec, and given 11 acres of park space that extend to the roof, which was designed by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA. That combination turns the project into more than a gallery opening; it is a major site launch in Los Angeles with a $1-billion price tag behind it.
George Lucas first announced plans to move forward with the museum in 2017, and this opening now puts his rotating collection of narrative art into circulation. The practical takeaway is simple: the museum is not arriving with a single headline exhibition, but with a deep bench of curated material that should give visitors a full first look at what its collection can do.
