The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened to the public Tuesday, Sept. 22, in Los Angeles' Exposition Park, welcoming a sold-out crowd, MyNewsLA reports. Founders George Lucas and Mellody Hobson marked the opening with architect Ma Yansong and museum CEO Tracey Bates, and greeted the first 100 visitors. The museum was first announced in 2010, CNN reports, and moved through San Francisco and Chicago before landing in South Los Angeles.
The museum is privately funded by Lucas and Hobson at an estimated cost of more than $1 billion, and no public money was used for construction, USC Annenberg Media reports. California gave the museum a 99-year lease at $30 per year.
The building
The five-story, 300,000-square-foot building was designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects with Stantec. It is MAD's first cultural project in the U.S., according to Ma. It holds more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space across more than 30 galleries, according to the museum. Landscape architect Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA designed 11 acres of park and gardens around it, with 10 monumental outdoor sculptures, on a 13-acre campus.
The building also contains two 299-seat theaters running continuous film programs, a free public research library, a retail store and a full-service restaurant, Skywalker Grill. The library holds more than 30,000 comic books, select holdings from the Skywalker Ranch Library, about 3,000 art books donated by Steve Martin and Ann Martin, and more than 2,900 volumes from the personal library of mythologist Joseph Campbell.
The collection
The inaugural exhibitions present more than 1,300 works from the collection. Artists include Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Artemisia Gentileschi, Jacob Lawrence, Frank Frazetta, Diego Rivera, Gordon Parks, Charles Schulz, Frank Miller, Robert Crumb, Judith F. Baca and JR. Rockwell, Wyeth, Jessie Willcox Smith, Maxfield Parrish, Frazetta and Thomas Hart Benton each have individual galleries. A fifth-floor mural gallery includes works acquired directly from Banksy's studio.
The first floor opens with "The History of Narrative Art: Heroes • Myths • The Sacred," which pairs collection pieces with reproductions of immovable works, including the Sistine Chapel ceiling, cave paintings from Altamira in Spain and the Aztec Sun Stone. The museum produced those reproductions with the Vatican Museums, the Louvre, Spain's Altamira museum and Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
The cinema collection includes the complete Lucas Archives from 1971 to 2012. The inaugural "Star Wars in Motion" exhibition covers vehicles from the first six films, including Luke Skywalker's Landspeeder from "A New Hope" (1977) and the first physical build of General Grievous' Wheel Bike from "Revenge of the Sith" (2005). "Star Wars" material occupies about 7% of the museum, Hobson told ABC News.
Tickets and hours
Admission is $25 for adults and $21 for visitors 65 and older. Entry is free for children 17 and under, members, active-duty military and LM37 passholders, who are current residents of the 90037 ZIP code. The museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays; 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturdays; and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. It is closed Tuesdays.
Opening night
An invitation-only opening night on Saturday, Sept. 19, was co-chaired by Tom Cruise, Julie Bell, Guillermo del Toro, Greta Gerwig, Lewis Hamilton, Jensen Huang, JR, Steven Spielberg and Pharrell Williams, ABC News reports. Williams opened the event with the Voices of Fire gospel choir. A drone show narrated by Oprah Winfrey and Samuel L. Jackson followed, and the Black Eyed Peas closed the night with a surprise performance. Guests included Harrison Ford, per ABC News, and Mark Hamill and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, MyNewsLA reports.
Three cities
San Francisco rejected Lucas' four-year effort to build on waterfront parkland overlooking the Presidio, CBS Chicago reports. In June 2014, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a Chicago lakefront site between Soldier Field and McCormick Place. Friends of the Parks filed a federal lawsuit in November 2014, arguing the city could not transfer lakefront land to a private entity. A federal judge blocked construction while the suit was pending, and the museum's board abandoned Chicago in June 2016. Lucas chose Los Angeles in January 2017. Completion was initially set for 2021 and was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The museum also went through leadership changes before opening. Former director and CEO Sandra Jackson-Dumont departed, with Lucas assuming responsibility for "content direction"; the museum laid off 15 full-time and seven part-time staff a month later, and chief curator Pilar Tompkins Rivas later resigned, CNN reports. Bates told CNN that Lucas "was always the lead curator."
The opening follows the May release of "The Mandalorian and Grogu," the first "Star Wars" theatrical release since 2019. Uristocrat has also covered the Brooklyn Museum's plans for new permanent African art galleries and the Studio Museum in Harlem's new building.
Source: MyNewsLA, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, CNN, USC Annenberg Media, CBS Chicago
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