With the build continuing ahead of its 2023 opening, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has been expanding its artistic pallate, adding works by Frida Kahlo, Robert Colescott and Artemisia Gentileschi to Lucas’ beloved Norman Rockwell treasure trove.
When the filmmaker George Lucas announced his plans to build the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art nearly a decade ago, the idea of “narrative art” seemed as flimsy as a makeshift Hollywood stage set. To many, it simply seemed like a superficial way of grouping the comics, illustration art and Norman Rockwell paintings that Lucas has long collected along with some beloved Star Wars art, costumes and other artefacts from the extensive Lucasfilm Archives.
But these days, with construction of the museum in Los Angeles well under way (the projected opening is in 2023) and a string of recent acquisitions, the museum’s interest in visual storytelling and mythmaking—as well as myth-busting—is evolving. The focus is extending well beyond the fantasy of an innocent white America featured in Rockwell’s work to include art by major Black and Latino artists.
The more expansive and inclusive vision comes both from Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, a prominent Black business leader and philanthropist whom he married in 2013. And it was reflected in some acquisitions by the museum’s founding director, Don Bacigalupi, most notably the archive of the artist Judy Baca—around 350 objects from sketches to correspondence—from her epic 1970s (and still ongoing) mural project about California’s multicultural history known as The Great Wall of Los Angeles.
If visitors attend loking for a galactic gallery of art by Ralph McQuarrie then they won’t be disappointed, but the LMNA believe the art on display will be of interest to lovers of Star Wars and the tastes of The Maker himself.
While some may feel that Rockwell and Baca, or Gentileschi and Star Wars illustrator Ralph McQuarrie, are strange bedfellows, the museum’s leaders are sanguine. “What would be fantastic is if people came looking for Star Wars and learn about Ralph McQuarrie and then they learn about Gentileschi,” Jackson-Dumont says. “If they come for Star Wars and leave having seen Kara Walker. Or they come for Gentileschi and leave loving the Hernandez brothers,” she says, referring to the Chicano comics creators.
After previous attempts to build the new museum in San Francisco and Chicago were thwarted, Lucas found a home for the space in Los Angeles in 2017. It is located in a museum-rich area called Exposition Park at the edge of south Los Angeles, an area with a sizeable Black population that has been eclipsed in recent years by an influx of Latino families. Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects and situated within a new 11-acre park, the futuristic-looking building will boast around 100,000 sq. ft of gallery space.
The museum’s collection is strongest in 20th- and 21st- century art but begins around 2100BC with an Egyptian polychrome relief that depicts the afterlife of an elite official, and includes some Renaissance paintings as well. The through line, which goes against the grain of so much conceptual art being made today, is a sort of populism: an emphasis on the power of art to reach people, which both the director and chief curator describe as “legibility”.
- Hardcover Book
- Zahn, Timothy (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 576 Pages - 11/16/2021 (Publication Date) - Random House Worlds (Publisher)
