Lucas Museum of Narrative Art announces 18 inaugural exhibitions

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles will open on 22 September with 18 thematic exhibitions curated by founder George Lucas. Revealed on 30 April, the inaugural lineup features over 1,200 objects across 30-plus galleries spanning 100,000 sq. ft. Exhibitions cover media like photography, architecture, and cinema; genres such as manga, anime, and comics; and themes like History, Everyday life (with subsections on Community, Love, Motherhood, Sports), and Narrative forms (adventure, fantasy, romance, sci-fi). Six solo shows highlight American artists Thomas Hart Benton, Frank Frazetta, Jessie Willcox Smith, Maxfield Parrish, Norman Rockwell, and N.C. Wyeth. Medium-specific exhibitions include Murals with works by Diego Rivera, Judith F. Baca, and JR, and Photography featuring Dorothea Lange, Robert Capa, Gordon Parks, and Alfred Eisenstaedt. The museum's collection totals over 40,000 works, including the Separate Cinema Archive and Lucas Archives. Director Sandra Jackson-Dumont left in February 2025; Lucas now leads curatorial programming. In May 2025, 14% of full-time staff were laid off. First announced in 2013, the museum's budget grew from $700m to $1bn. The building by Ma Yansong of Mad Architects is nearly complete, with landscaping by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA. It is the third major LA art institution opening this year, after LACMA's David Geffen Galleries (4 May) and Dataland by Refik Anadol (20 June).