A Billion Dollars in South LA: The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

Today, a museum opens in Exposition Park, South Los Angeles. It cost a billion dollars. It was built by a filmmaker and his wife. It contains 1,300 works spanning centuries. And it argues — loudly, expensively, architecturally — that comic books, illustration, and cinema deserve the same institutional respect as painting and sculpture.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is George Lucas’s legacy project, co-founded with Mellody Hobson, his wife and the chair of Ariel Investments. The building, designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, is a 300,000-square-foot sculptural form meant to look like a cloud hovering over the park. Inside are 35 galleries named after human experiences — love, family, community, play, work — holding everything from prehistoric cave painting reproductions to Norman Rockwell to Frida Kahlo to Star Wars production art. One of the centrepiece works is Judith F. Baca’s The Great Wall of Los Angeles, a half-mile-long mural documenting the histories of Indigenous, Black, Latino, and Asian communities in the city. At the opening gala last week, Queen Latifah told the room: “Paris has the Louvre, New York has the Met, and now LA has its artistic equal.”

That is a large claim. It is also, in its way, the point. The Lucas Museum’s founding argument is that “narrative art” — art that tells stories through images — has been treated as a lesser form by institutions that privilege abstraction, conceptualism, and the avant-garde. Comics sit in one building; Rembrandts sit in another. Lucas and Hobson want them in the same room. “This is a museum of the people’s art,” Hobson has said. “The images are illustrations of beliefs we live with every day. For that reason, this art belongs to everyone.”

The phrase “the people’s art” carries a particular charge when the museum stands where it does. Exposition Park sits in South LA — a historically Black and Latino neighbourhood that has hosted the Coliseum since 1923 and the California Science Center since 1951, but has never had a cultural institution on this scale built for, or by, the communities that surround it. Mellody Hobson is one of the most prominent Black women in American finance. Her involvement in the museum’s founding is not incidental — it shapes the institution’s stated commitment to accessibility, to free programming, and to a 13-acre public park designed to serve a neighbourhood that has been chronically underinvested in green space.

The question the museum will have to answer over the next decade is whether its democratic premise survives contact with the art world’s institutional logic. A billion-dollar building attracts a certain kind of visitor, a certain kind of donor, a certain kind of programming pressure. The galleries named “love” and “play” and “community” are warm words. The neighbourhood surrounding the museum has its own vocabulary for what it needs — and a long memory of institutions that arrived with promises and delivered foot traffic. Whether the Lucas Museum becomes a genuinely public space or a destination that happens to be located in South LA is a story that will take years to unfold.

For now, the doors are open. The comic books are on the walls next to the oil paintings. The park is free. And a cloud-shaped building in a historically Black neighbourhood is making a very expensive argument about whose stories count. It is worth watching who walks through the door.

The List

1. Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — Opens today in LA’s Exposition Park. 300,000 square feet, 1,300 works, 35 galleries, a 13-acre public park. Comics alongside Kahlo. Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles inside the building. The biggest museum opening in the US this year. Free park, ticketed galleries.
2. Kerry James Marshall: The Histories — Now open at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. Seventy works across four decades, including eight new paintings reportedly addressing African complicity in the slave trade. Marshall’s first French exhibition, and his most provocative body of new work in years.
3. Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter — A comprehensive retrospective at C/O Berlin, opened during Berlin Art Week. One of the most important living American photographers, whose work on race, gender, and power has defined a generation of image-making. If you missed Berlin Art Week, this show continues.
4. Homecoming: The Return of the Johannesburg Art Gallery Collection — At Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, through 31 October. Works from one of the continent’s most important public art holdings, exhibited while JAG undergoes long-term renovation. A chance to see what a South African national collection looks like when it leaves its building.
5. Robyn Kahukiwa retrospective — At MCA Sydney, running through August 2027. The late Māori artist’s first major Australian exhibition — warriors, deities, nurturers, and the Indigenous female body as a site of power. A year-long show that rewards repeat visits.

What We’re Watching

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens its doors today in Exposition Park, and the first question most visitors will ask is not about the art but about the building. Ma Yansong’s design is deliberately disorienting — a cloud-shaped mass that seems to float above the park, with no straight lines, no visible columns on the exterior, and an approach that forces you to walk through thirteen acres of landscaped gardens before you enter. The architecture is the argument: narrative art is not a box you put things in, it is an experience you move through. Inside, the 35 galleries are arranged by human themes rather than chronology or medium, which means a cave painting reproduction sits near a comic book original, which sits near a Frida Kahlo, which sits near Star Wars concept art. The refusal to separate “high” from “low” is either the museum’s most radical proposition or its most populist one, depending on where you stand. Today it is just open. The judgments will take years. Go see it for yourself.

The Calendar

New York

• Taryn Simon: Father Country I Do Love You · Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum · Now open · Simon occupies the entire Rotunda — photographs, text, video, sculpture
• Fall gallery season · Chelsea, Lower East Side, Tribeca · In full swing — hundreds of new shows

Atlanta

• The World(s) She Made: Kathleen Neal Cleaver · Auburn Avenue Research Library · Through January 2027

Los Angeles

• Lucas Museum of Narrative Art · Exposition Park · Opens today · 300,000 square feet, 1,300 works, 35 galleries, 13-acre park. The biggest museum opening in the US this year
• Fall gallery openings · Various — new programmes launching across the city

Toronto

• Post-TIFF · The festival ended September 20th — the conversation about which films will travel begins now
• AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) · Ongoing exhibitions

Kingston

• National Gallery of Jamaica · Ongoing — Edna Manley’s sculptures and contemporary Jamaican art