After more than a decade of planning, setbacks, and anticipation, George Lucas is ready to share something deeply personal with the world. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is set to open its doors in Los Angeles on September 22, 2026, and everything about it reflects the man behind “Star Wars.”
A Museum Born From a Lifetime of Collecting
Lucas’s love of art goes back further than most people might expect. Long before he became one of Hollywood’s most iconic filmmakers, he was a college student buying comic book artwork because it was all he could afford. “Back when I was in college, I couldn’t afford real art, but I could afford comic art,” he said at San Diego Comic-Con 2025, according to Attractions Management magazine. “I’ve been collecting narrative art since then.”
Over the following five decades, that collection grew into something extraordinary. Co-founded with his wife Mellody Hobson, the museum will house more than 40,000 works spanning cave art, paintings, illustrations, photography, comic book art, digital media, and film. Rather than organizing works by period the way traditional museums do, the 35 galleries, spread across 100,000 square feet, are grouped around universal human experiences: love, family, community, childhood, adventure, and more.
The collection features works by Norman Rockwell, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Frank Frazetta, and Jack Kirby, alongside cinematic artifacts including props, costumes, storyboards, and posters. The museum will also house the full Lucasfilm Archives, covering materials from 1971 through 2012.
The Story Behind the Star Wars Connection
For Lucas, the museum is also a celebration of artists who have long gone uncredited, the illustrators and concept artists whose work made his films possible in the first place. When he was first pitching “Star Wars” to studio executives in the 1970s, nobody could quite grasp what he was describing. So he hired illustrator Ralph McQuarrie to create a series of concept artworks, and those images are what convinced Twentieth Century Fox to fund the original film.
“People can’t understand what I’m talking about because they’ve never seen it before,” Lucas told the Wall Street Journal in October 2025. “That’s why I had so many illustrators working for me. I relied on them to help people get the picture. I’ve worked with hundreds of illustrators in my life. They’re all great, but they don’t get recognised.”
One of the museum’s central missions is to change that, to give illustration, comic book art, and populist art the same standing as fine art, and to open that world up to people who might never otherwise set foot in a traditional museum. “This is a temple to the people’s art,” Lucas said at San Diego Comic-Con.
A Building as Bold as Its Vision
The building itself is a statement. Designed by architect Ma Yansong, the futuristic structure appears to float above its surroundings, wrapped in a pale fibreglass-reinforced polymer skin that gives it the look of something from another world entirely. The formerly paved parking lots around it have been transformed into an 11-acre green space with native plants, over 200 new trees, meadows, and paths.
“I have been a fan of architect Ma Yansong from his earliest works,” Lucas wrote for Time magazine in April 2025. “I believe visitors will come not just for the collection, but also the building — it’s a work of art in and of itself.”
A Long Road to Opening Day
Getting here wasn’t easy. The museum was originally planned for San Francisco, then Chicago, before legal challenges and complications in both cities ultimately led Lucas to select Los Angeles in 2017. Construction broke ground in 2018 with an aim to open in 2021, but delays pushed that back to 2023, then 2025, and finally to September 2026.
But for Lucas and Hobson, the wait has only deepened their commitment to the project. The couple signed the Giving Pledge in 2010 — a commitment by some of the world’s wealthiest individuals to give the majority of their wealth to charitable causes — and view the museum as a direct expression of that promise. “We’ve always said we’re holding society’s money, which we fully intend to give back,” Hobson said, according to Attractions Management. “This is how we’re doing it.”
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens September 22, 2026, in Exposition Park, Los Angeles.
