Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Sets Opening for September 2026

After years of false starts and several postponements, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has an opening date.

The new cultural institution designed to celebrate illustrated storytelling, founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson, will open to the public on Sept. 22, 2026.

“This is a museum of the people’s art. The images are illustrations of beliefs we live with every day,” said Hobson in a statement making the date announcement. “For that reason, this art belongs to everyone.”

Located in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park, the building will have 35 galleries occupying 100,000 square feet. Galleries will be named to reflect the human experience, including love, family, community, play, work, and sports. The Lucas Museum will boast a permanent collection that holds more than 40,000 works representing one of the most significant collections of narrative art.

“Stories are mythology, and when illustrated, they help humans understand the mysteries of life,” stated Lucas.

The collection will showcase works by artists including Norman Rockwell, Kadir Nelson, Jessie Willcox Smith, N. C. Wyeth, Beatrix Potter, Judy Baca, Frida Kahlo, and Maxfield Parrish; as well as comic art legends such as Winsor McCay, Jack Kirby, Frank Frazetta, Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, and R. Crumb; and photographers Gordon Parks, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Dorothea Lange.

The museum will also house the Lucas Archives, containing models, props, concept art, and costumes from Lucas’s filmmaking career.

Wednesday’s announcement also came with reveals of works newly announced to be on display in the museum. Among the pieces are Frazetta’s cover for A Princess of Mars (1970); Rockwell’s cover for The Saturday Evening Post, “Age of Romance”; an unpublished Potter drawing titled “Mouse with a spinning wheel” (1890); “The Duel on the Beach,” a Wyeth illustration for Ladies’ Home Journal (1926); and Ernie Barnes’ “The Critics Corner” (2007).

Lucas has been on a tour, drumming up interest in the museum. In July, he made his first ever appearance at San Diego International Comic-Con in a panel with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, Star Wars production designer Doug Chiang, and moderator Queen Latifah. In October, he showed up at New York Comic Con with a panel moderated by Martin Scorsese and guests Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, both known for their fantasy paintings and posters.

At a reported cost of $1 billion, the museum has been more than a decade in the making. The founders went down the road with San Francisco and Chicago before public and political complications proved to be looming Death Stars. After selecting Los Angeles in 2017, construction broke ground in 2018 with the aim to open in 2021. Delays due to the pandemic and construction issues pushed the opening to 2023 then to 2025 and finally to 2026.

See some of the new art pieces below.