The long-awaited Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will open to the public Tuesday in Exposition Park, bringing a collection devoted to visual storytelling that spans centuries and includes works ranging from paintings and photography to comics, murals and artifacts from George Lucas’ “Star Wars” films.
The five-story, 300,000-square-foot museum was founded by Lucas and business executive Mellody Hobson and is dedicated to visual storytelling across cultures, centuries and media.
The museum features more than 100,000 square feet of exhibition space across more than 30 galleries, with its inaugural exhibitions presenting more than 1,300 works from the collection, according to the museum.
“The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art was created to honor humanity’s stories and the artists who illustrate them,” Lucas said in a statement earlier this month. “The artists in this collection didn’t just create images, they connected our modern imaginations with our ancient emotions — with common beliefs creating community. Their work spans genres, media, and time. They deserve to be in a museum.”
The museum’s collection ranges from paintings, illustrations and photography to comics, children’s books, murals and cinema. Artists represented include Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Frank Frazetta, Diego Rivera, Gordon Parks, Charles Schulz, Robert Crumb and Judith F. Baca.
The inaugural exhibitions trace the history of narrative art, beginning with a first-floor exhibition exploring heroes, myths and sacred imagery across thousands of years, according to the museum.
Other galleries focus on themes including love, family and community, as well as fantasy, romance and adventure. Galleries dedicated to various forms of storytelling feature comic books, manga, graphic novels, photography and murals.
The museum also displays reproductions of works and sites that cannot be moved, including the Sistine Chapel ceiling, ancient cave paintings from Altamira in Spain and the Aztec Sun Stone.
The museum’s cinema collection includes the complete Lucas Archives from 1971 to 2012. An inaugural exhibition titled “Star Wars in Motion” features concept designs, props and costumes associated with vehicles from the first six “Star Wars” films, including Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder and the first physical build of General Grievous’ Wheel Bike.
“We wanted a museum unlike any other — one that brings people from every walk of life through the same doors,” Hobson said. “That’s why this collection holds so many different kinds of stories: so that more people can walk in and, somewhere in these galleries, see themselves — and the world they know — reflected back.”
The building was designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects with Stantec and features a curving exterior clad in more than 1,200 individually shaped panels. A central arch spanning 185 feet rises above a public plaza.
The museum is surrounded by a new 13-acre park and gardens designed by landscape architect Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA on land that was previously an asphalt parking lot. The grounds include more than 300 newly planted trees, an amphitheater, a meadow, a hanging garden and 10 monumental outdoor sculptures.
The museum also features two theaters offering continuous film programs, a research library that is free to the public and Skywalker Grill, a full-service restaurant open to museum visitors and the general public.
The research library includes more than 30,000 comic books, select holdings from the Skywalker Ranch Library, about 3,000 art books donated by Steve Martin and his wife, Ann Martin, and more than 2,900 volumes from the personal library of writer and mythologist Joseph Campbell, whose work influenced Lucas’ creation of “Star Wars,” museum officials said.