Viewing Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

May the Art be with you.

George Lucas has spent a career building worlds. Now, with Mellody Hobson, he has built a museum around the images that make stories stay with people. Newly opened in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art looks across centuries of visual storytelling, giving popular image-making the same serious attention usually reserved for the traditional museum canon.

Ma Yansong of MAD, working with Stantec, has designed a 300,000-square-foot building containing more than 100,000 square feet of galleries. More than 1,300 works fill the inaugural presentation, with artists including Vincent van Gogh, Jacob Lawrence and Norman Rockwell appearing within a collection that also makes room for comic books and cinema.

And yes, there is plenty for Star Wars devotees to fawn over. ‘Star Wars in Motion’ draws on the Lucas Archives to explore the vehicles imagined for the first six films, with concept drawings and original production material including Luke Skywalker’s Landspeeder and the first physical build of General Grievous’s Wheel Bike. Elsewhere, the museum’s film programme runs continuously across two dedicated, state-of-the-art theatres.

Outside, the building lands within a new 13-acre park designed by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA, with ten monumental sculptures dotted through the grounds. There is also a free Research Library inside and Skywalker Grill waiting at the top of the museum. Give yourself time – this is one story that was never going to fit into a single gallery.