George Lucas And Mellody Hobson Open A Museum For The Art Of Storytelling

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened to the public in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Sept. 22, turning a long-awaited addition to Exposition Park into a place Angelenos can finally walk through for themselves.

Founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, the museum starts with a broad proposition: the pictures that carry stories deserve serious attention, whether they appear in a painting, a comic, an illustration, a movie or across a public wall. That makes the new institution less a shrine to one filmmaker than a meeting place for forms of visual culture that museums have not always displayed side by side.

Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, the building contains more than 30 galleries and over 100,000 square feet of exhibition space. Two theaters extend the experience beyond the gallery walls, while parkland and gardens give the campus an outdoor life of its own.

That setting matters. Exposition Park already brings together science, natural history, sport and education in South Los Angeles. The Lucas Museum adds a new question to the neighborhood's cultural mix: how do images teach us to see heroes, communities, conflict and possibility? Its range — from illustration and comics to cinema, painting and murals — invites visitors to make connections across media rather than treating popular and fine art as separate worlds.

The community opening on Sept. 22 marked the museum's public debut; this story is dated Sept. 24. Visitors now have the chance to test the founders' idea in person, moving through galleries built around storytelling rather than a single period or medium.

For Los Angeles, a city where images are both an industry and a shared language, the museum feels especially at home. It also creates another reason to spend a full day in Exposition Park — inside the galleries, in the theaters and out among the gardens.

Which kind of visual storytelling would you head toward first: illustration, comics, murals, painting or cinema?