Lucas Museum of Narrative Art shows its galleries ahead of a 22 September opening

George Lucas told a press preview on 2 September that opening the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art had almost broken his will. The building in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, opens to the public on 22 September. Tickets for the first days went quickly over the summer. Fencing around the site has started to come down.

Lucas and Mellody Hobson funded the project themselves. The current estimate sits above $1 billion. Ma Yansong of MAD designed the 300,000-square-foot structure, a low cloud or a grounded ship depending on who is looking. Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA laid out the gardens. Inside there are 100,000 square feet of gallery space across 35 rooms, two theatres, a library, a restaurant, a cafe and a rooftop Skywalker Grill.

What narrative art means on the walls

Lucas has said the museum exists to honour illustrators, the people who draw stories that already exist in words. Hobson has called it a museum of the people art. The collection now holds more than 40,000 works. Names on the checklist include Norman Rockwell, N. C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Jessie Willcox Smith, Beatrix Potter, Kadir Nelson, Judy Baca, Frida Kahlo, Jack Kirby, Winsor McCay, Frank Frazetta, Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, R. Crumb, Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Galleries are titled by theme rather than by school: love, family, community, play, work, sports, childhood, adventure, motherhood, manga, comics, children books, murals. Separate rooms are reserved for Rockwell, Wyeth, Frazetta and Parrish. Star Wars is present and smaller than the building silhouette suggests. Museum staff put the franchise at about seven percent of gallery space. A Naboo N-1 starfighter stands in a lobby. Luke Skywalker landspeeder is in the cinema gallery. A Yoda statue sits on a fountain in the garden.

A decade of site fights

The project was first discussed around 2013. San Francisco and then Chicago were tried and dropped. Los Angeles agreed to Exposition Park in 2017. Ground was broken in 2018. Opening dates of 2021, 2023 and 2025 all slipped. Lucas, now 82, had said he wanted the doors open in his lifetime. That sentence is now a calendar date.

Whether the public treats the place as a serious museum or as a Star Wars shed will be decided by the 93 percent of wall that is not a lightsaber. Rockwell and Kirby in the same building is the wager. The preview gave reporters enough of both to see that the wager is real. The public gets its turn on 22 September.