Lucas Museum of Narrative Art puts the Star Wars creator's mind on display

George Lucas' celebration of visual storytelling, a mix of high-, middle-, and low-brow fare from comics, illustration, cinema, photography, and more, is the culmination of a 20-year journey. The A.V. Club took part in a preview of the museum, which opens to the public on September 22.

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  September 3, 2026 | 2:40pm
Courtesy of Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
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Lucas Museum of Narrative Art puts the Star Wars creator's mind on display

If you cracked open George Lucas’ head, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art might spill out. The museum took 17 years, three cities, and a billion dollars to complete. In essence, it’s his artistic interests broken into exhibits. A little neo-futurist sci-fi, a touch of Norman Rockwell nostalgia, and scenes of fedora-wearing archeologists clocking Nazis adorn the curved walls of the Star Destroyer-esque edifice in South Los Angeles, across from Lucas’ alma mater, USC Film School. The museum defines “narrative art” as visual storytelling that “elicits a feeling.” When the LMNA opens to the public on September 22, Visitors will find the stories they’re looking for. 

The biomorphic structure, adorned with gridded panels that recall the keyframe Death Star plans, is a work of art in and of itself. A statue garden, commemorating, among other things, Padmé’s gladiatorial battle on Geonosis, surrounds the five-floor, 300,000-square-foot structure, providing Expo Park locals with a gorgeous (and free-to-enter) new park, museum, and research library. Once through security, a humongous, waving canopy shades the courtyard, with light beaming down from a glass oculus at the center. Like Roger Sterling’s office art, you feel like you’re getting sucked into this thing, but the Naboo Fighter should ground you squarely back in George Lucas’ museum. The courtyard’s free-flowing design leads directly into the museum, where the first floor’s immersive “History Of Narrative Art” exhibit primes visitors for the top floors. 

By history, we’re talking stardust and cave paintings. On the ceiling, constellations represent the mystery of the cosmos before we’re brought back to Earth with cave paintings of buffalo. How would ancient people make sense of the night sky? The exhibit doesn’t answer the question explicitly, but like the sequential narrative of a comic strip, it tells a story of progress. Contextualized below the pop art of the main gallery, it’s hard not to look at a reproduction of the Sistine Chapel, captured in high-definition light boxes, and not think of the comics splash pages in the galleries to come. This area uses expertly presented reproductions that more than get the job done, creating as seamless a connection to the past as Star Wars is to King Arthur. History is, as the museum’s curator often said, like poetry. It rhymes. 

The main gallery represents the melting pot that makes Lucas’ work so American. Each room is compartmentalized by theme (“Romance,” “Fantasy,” “Sci-fi,” “Comics”), but the space allows visitors to move through each freely. Illustrations of the American West crash into Japanese manga. A collection of N.C. Wyeth’s romantic Robert Louis Stevenson pieces lead into Children’s Stories, where the Cowardly Lion costume separates Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things paintings from Andy Warhol’s glittering “Howdy Doody.” Comic panels from Marjane Satrapi, R. Crumb, and, yup, Jim Davis, stand between a Norman Rockwell gallery and a collection of Frank Frazetta fantasy and sci-fi illustrations. It must be the first museum to invite visitors to compare Frazetta’s buxom warrior women to the female juror in Rockwell’s “The Jury Room.” 

Star Wars is the sum of its influences, which include Lucas’ political beliefs. That side of Lucas’ brain haunts the top floor’s mural collection. Step off the glass elevators and visitors are greeted by a massive Diego Rivera, “Man, Controller Of The Universe,” which requires a few minutes of awe. Turn left, and there’s a wall of Banksys. None of it is particularly subtle, but neither is Lucas. 

Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a George Lucas museum without an exhibit dedicated to the museum’s most famous and influential work: Star Wars. Anakin’s podracer, R2-D2, and a Scout Trooper with speeder bike will no doubt please the Death Sticks addicts looking for the fix. This exhibit is the culmination of all that’s in the museum. Bruce Minney’s Nazi-punching illustrations sit next to a bronze Indiana Jones, as the lineage of these works extends from room to room. Star Wars and Lucas kept this stuff in the pop-cultural mind, and the Museum is an opportunity for Lucas to show that all art is part of a continuum, with the past feeding the present. 

Throughout the press day presentations, the Museum staff kept pitching the space as a “People’s Museum.” In many ways, they succeeded. Whether you’re a One Piece fanatic or an admirer of Dorothea Lange, LMNA’s galleries feature both something recognizable and something new. The exhibits aren’t overwhelming; the whole museum can be enjoyed in roughly an hour, with two theaters, one for documentaries and one for experimental film, running all day continuously. (Additionally, it’s the only place to legally see the unaired Star Wars Detours series.)

Lucas hasn’t made a movie since Revenge Of The Sith. Instead, he built a monument to the works that influenced him, and to the artists he was frequently accused of ripping off. Great artists steal. Generous ones put their stolen goods on display.

 
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