From the Fine Art Connoisseur, September/October 2025 Editor’s Note:
Something Big on the Horizon
For well over a decade, we’ve been keeping a hopeful eye on the development of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Co-founded by the renowned filmmaker George Lucas (b. 1944) and his wife, investment manager Mellody Hobson (b. 1969), this is going to be — according to its website — “the world’s first institution 
dedicated to the exploration of narrative art, celebrating illustrated storytelling across eras and cultures.” It goes on to say that the museum will show us “how narrative art influences societies — shaping beliefs, communicating values, inspiring imagination, and creating communities. We empower people to engage with artworks through the compelling stories they tell.”
That all sounds promising, and this September we gained some insights when 6,000 fans packed a room at San Diego’s annual Comic-Con International jamboree. Moderated by actor Queen Latifah, that panel discussion featured Lucas himself, Lucasfilm executive design director Doug Chiang, and one of the museum’s board members, Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. The audience was treated to photos of the gigantic building under construction, design renderings of its interiors, and highlights from the permanent collection.
Lucas called the museum “a temple to the people’s art” and noted, “Society cannot exist without a common belief system. And that’s where illustration is vital to show you what that means in everyday life.” Latifah concluded, “The connection that I hear in our various conversations is emotion — an emotional connection that the art evokes from you… I think when people step into this museum, they will be emotionally affected by it.”
For now, the museum is scheduled to open in 2026 at the center of its own 11-acre campus in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park, near the Natural History Museum and University of Southern California. Designed by architect Ma Yansong of MAD Architects (with Stantec as executive architect), the 300,000-square-foot building will feature not only galleries, but also two theaters and spaces for learning, events, dining, and retail.
The Lucas Museum has had its share of challenges over the years. Its earlier efforts to build in San Francisco, then Chicago, were rebuffed, and there have been numerous changes in staff leadership. For centuries, very rich people have constructed very large buildings (in California alone, there’s the needlessly steroidal Hearst Castle at San Simeon), so the eye-watering scale of this new structure is not particularly interesting.
What should excite art lovers is the founding couple’s collection of “more than 150,000 objects.” Naturally some of these are in the Lucas Archive, with its original props, models, costumes, and vehicles from such productions as Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Their presence will guarantee huge attendance for the rest of the 21st century, and that’s great. More intriguing, however, are the holdings of everything from “ancient murals to original illustrations,” including comics, children’s books, magazines, cinema, animation, and digital media.
On the fine art front, we now know that the inaugural displays will contain masterworks by the 20th-century illustrators N.C. Wyeth and Jessie Willcox Smith; paintings by such African American talents as Ernie Barnes and Robert Colescott; and a masterwork by Frida Kahlo. Strangely unmentioned so far is the trove of Norman Rockwell paintings that Lucas exhibited at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2010. Nor have we heard anything about his 19th-century art treasures by such academicians as Lawrence Alma-Tadema. We fully understand the museum’s need to lead with popular names like Star Wars, so we’re happy to sit back and learn more later.
We promise to keep Fine Art Connoisseur readers posted on this exciting project, which could help a big international audience appreciate storytelling’s crucial role in visual art — past, present, and future. We wish everyone at the museum well as they apply their finishing touches in the year ahead.
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I find it quite interesting and look forward to visiting it. Hopefully it’s as creative and informative and influential as they hope it will be. As an artist, I look forward to seeing what can be done in that realm. Thank you for keeping us informed of these new experiences.