LOS ANGELES — After nearly 20 years of planning and construction, along with layoffs and staffing disputes, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is set to open to the public later this month in South Los Angeles’s Exposition Park. This week, journalists were brought through the new institution, offering an early look at the scattered and overly simplistic mix of art awaiting visitors.
Founded by filmmaker George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson, co-CEO of Ariel Investments, the reportedly $1 billion building by Ma Yansong/MAD Architects contains their 40,000-work collection centered on what they describe as “visual storytelling.” According to press materials, the holdings include illustrations, history paintings, comic art, films, murals, and other forms that “have not always received the respect they deserve.” The five-story, wave-like, spaceship-inspired structure stands on an 11-acre campus of rolling green hills designed by Mia Lehrer of Los Angeles’s Studio-MLA, who also created the building’s green roof.
“For thousands of years, that was the only way you could tell a story, with pictures,” Lucas said at a press preview on Wednesday, September 2, appearing to overlook oral histories and song. “Pictures and stories are very powerful. Put them together, and those two elements make a society.” He added, “Narrative Art creates groups of people with common belief systems, which allows them to work together and not kill each other,” seeming to settle, at least for the moment, the long-running question of what Narrative Art actually is.
And yet the museum’s curatorial approach offers remarkably little narrative. The collection is spread across 100,000 square feet of gallery space and organized into roughly 30 thematic sections — Adventure, Romance, Motherhood, Civic Life, Science Fiction, Comics, Sports, and more — with a few galleries devoted to figures such as fantasy artist Frank Frazetta, American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, and Norman Rockwell, whose specific strain of folksy Americana runs throughout. Most works are shown without context or wall text beyond polished metal lettering naming each section.
The result is a thematic display that throws together works from different eras and styles on the basis of the faintest connections, as though to declare, “Look, we’re all the same: we play sports, we work, we raise children!” There is little evident interest in examining the cultural or social conditions that produced the art, leaving the museum’s interpretation as broad as its ambitions.
