After years of delays, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles will finally open its doors to the public on September 22, 2026.

Founded by George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson, and designed by architect Ma Yansong, the museum will be home to a collection of more than 40,000 works centering illustrated storytelling as a universal language. “This is a museum of the people’s art—the images are illustrations of beliefs we live with every day. For that reason, this art belongs to everyone,” Hobson said in a statement. “Our hope is that as people move through the galleries, they will see themselves, and their humanity, reflected back.”

Rendering of Lucas Museum of Narrative Art by Stantec and Proloog. Photo courtesy of Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.

The 300,000 sq ft venue will unpack that humanity across its 35 galleries, which variously spotlight themes such as love, community, play, work, sports, childhood, and more. Its foundational collection features such iconic artists as N.C. Wyeth, Norman Rockwell, and Frida Kahlo, as well as illustration and comic giants including Frank Frazetta, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and Jack Kirby, with pieces spanning antiquities and mural paintings to comic art and children’s book illustrations. Select artifacts from Star Wars, Lucas’s name-making franchise, will also share the spotlight.

The stories being told in these artworks, the founders noted, form a mirror of the human experience. “Stories are mythology,” Lucas said in a statement, “and when illustrated, they help humans understand the mysteries of life.”

Frank Frazetta, cover for A Princess of Mars (1970). Photo courtesy of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.

What’s Inside George Lucas’s Museum?

Nearly a decade in the making, the Lucas Museum finally broke ground in L.A. in 2018, after plans to build in Chicago and San Francisco fell through. It was slated to open in 2022, before supply chain shortages and pandemic-related issues pushed the opening further back to 2025.

The delays, however, did not dampen the museum’s acquisitions. In 2022, it snapped up a print series by New York-based artist Chitra Ganesh; a photograph by the late Laura Aguilar; and an illustration by Jaime Hernandez, which was created for the alternative comic Love and Rockets and appeared on the cover of a 2010 Village Voice issue.

Robert Colescott, George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975). © 2025 The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Those artworks join other, splashier purchases made by the Lucas Museum over the last several years. In 2021, it snagged Robert Colescott’s famed George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From an American History Textbook at Sotheby’s for $15.3 million—a purchase that, for many, announced the arrival of a new major player in the world of collecting institutions. 

That same year, the museum picked up Kerry James Marshall’s RHYTHM MASTR Daily Strip (Runners), a group of prints from 2018 aimed at redressing the lack of black representation in comics, as well as pieces by Frida Kahlo and Alice Neel. 

Frida Kahlo, Autorretrato dedicado al Dr. Eloesser (Self- Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser) (1940). © 2025 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, CDMX / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Narrative art, “shapes how we see each other, how we talk about each other, interact with each other, how we love, hate, control, do whatever with each other,” the Lucas Museum’s director and chief executive, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, told the Los Angeles Times in 2022. “It’s an amazingly powerful, socially shaping art form. These stories actually contribute to the world, and we need places where we unpack them. It actually can create a more humane society.”

In 2020, the museum acquired Four Freedoms Set II, a 2018 series of photographs by the art collective For Freedoms, as well as Art Connoisseurs, a 2019 painting by Kadir Nelson which appeared on the cover of the New Yorker the year it was created. Both artworks riff on the starchy whiteness in the work of Norman Rockwell—many examples of which also live in the Lucas Museum’s holdings.

These and other recently completed artworks will contrast a series of much older pieces in the museum’s collection. Included in the latter camp are The Judgment of Solomon (1526) by Lucas Cranach the Elder; Triumph of Galatea (c. 1650), attributed to Artemesia Gentileschi and Onofrio Palumbo; and John Singer Sargent’s Las Meninas, After Velásquez (1879), a copy of the Spanish painter’s masterpiece.

Jaime Hernandez, Locas Heroes, Village Voice cover April 21-27, 2010. Courtesy of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.

A Boost for Narrative Art

Throughout 2025, in the run-up to its grand opening, the Lucas Museum has hosted several panels at comic conventions in San Diego, L.A., and New York to spread the good word on narrative art.

In July, Lucas himself made his first appearance at San Diego’s Comic-Con International, on a panel that also featured filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and Doug Chiang, senior vice president and executive design director of Lucasfilm. Their conversation explored the museum’s focus on illustrative and comic art, a popular genre that hasn’t been immediately valued by the art establishment. Key works from the museum’s collection were highlighted, including original Peanuts strips dating back to the 1950s and the first-ever Flash Gordon comic strip.

George Lucas at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art panel at Comic-Con International 2025 at San Diego Convention Center, 2025. Photo: Eric Charbonneau / Lucas Museum Of Narrative Art via Getty Images.

“Imagine if we only had classical music, and rock ‘n’ roll was never created? This is rock ‘n’ roll and rock ‘n’ roll needs to be enshrined,” Del Toro said of such popular artworks. “This is memorializing a vociferous, expressive, and eloquent moment that belongs to all of us, and the museum celebrates this.”

The Lucas Museum’s latest panel at New York Comic Con last month saw Martin Scorsese moderate a discussion between French street artist JR, and fantasy artists Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell—all of whom will feature in the museum’s inaugural presentation. The panelists were eager to champion popular art forms, emphasizing their ability to evoke emotion and foster connection with rare immediacy. “A picture is something we get in an instant,” Bell noted.

Alex Raymond, Flash Gordon Sunday strip, January 7, 1934, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, Flash Gordon © 1934 King Features Syndicate, Inc. Courtesy of Profiles in History.

The talk also included a video preview of the museum and its sprawling grounds. “This museum, if anything, is a dedication to cultural fantasy,” Lucas said in the clip, “which is to give some voice to what we would call popular arts, which we live with every day.”

This story was originally published on September 21, 2022. It was updated on November 12, 2025, at 3.30 p.m. ET, to reflect the museum’s 2026 opening date and 2025 panel discussions.