On September 22, 2026, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens its doors in Exposition Park in Los Angeles, and for the first time, the kind of images usually found on a poster, in a comic book, or on a movie poster will have a world-class museum of their own. Behind the project are George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, who have spent five decades collecting more than 40,000 works - from Artemisia Gentileschi and Norman Rockwell to Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Robert Crumb. The museum is not a celebration of science fiction. It is an argument: that narrative imagery is just as much art as painting, and that the dividing line between high and popular culture has always been invented.
Quick facts: The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens to the public on Tuesday, September 22, 2026. The building covers about 28,000 square meters, including just over 9,000 square meters of exhibition space spread across more than thirty galleries. The inaugural exhibitions showcase more than 1,300 works from the collection, and the entire complex sits in a newly created park covering just over five hectares that was previously a paved parking lot.
Here’s how the lead-up to September 22 unfolded
The opening has been rolled out in stages. Members were admitted to previews between September 5 and 11, and on September 13 a special day was held for the neighbors: local business owners, organizations, schoolchildren, and residents in the museum’s own ZIP code area in South Los Angeles. On September 19, the building was inaugurated with an opening gala whose hosts say a great deal about the ambition - among them Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Greta Gerwig, Tom Cruise, street artist JR, illustrator Julie Bell, and Pharrell Williams. Only then, on September 22, will the doors open to everyone else.
The building itself was designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects together with Stantec, and according to the architects, it contains not a single straight line. The structure floats above the ground and rests on only a few points, creating a sheltered plaza beneath it. The central arch spans about 56 meters, and four stories up is an elliptical skylight that offers a view straight up at the sky. The façade consists of more than 1,200 curved fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels, each with its own unique shape.
A park designed by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA surrounds the building. Where there used to be asphalt, there are now over 300 newly planted trees, a hanging garden, an amphitheater, a meadow, and a fountain designed as a waterfall. The park is free and serves as an extension of the galleries: ten monumental sculptures are placed along the walkways, from Fernando Botero’s Maternity to a bronze version of Rosie the Riveter. The plants were selected for a warmer climate, with drought-tolerant and native species.
1,300 works that blur the line between art and popular culture
The visit begins on the ground floor with The History of Narrative Art: Heroes • Myths • The Sacred, an introduction to how visual storytelling has shaped faith, power, and community. What makes the gallery remarkable is its blend of original works with extremely accurate reproductions of things that can never be moved: the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the cave paintings of Altamira, the Aztec Sun Stone, and the winged bulls from the palace of Sargon II. The reproductions were created using 3D scanning in collaboration with the Vatican Museums, the Louvre, the Altamira research center, and Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology.
The fourth and fifth floors are organized by theme, medium, and individual artists. Vincent van Gogh, George Bellows, and Jacob Lawrence share galleries with Beatrix Potter, Charles White, and Ernie Barnes in spaces devoted to love, family, work, sports, and adventure. Other rooms focus on genres such as fantasy and romance, and on media such as comics, manga, graphic novels, photography, and murals, featuring artists like George Herriman, Charles Schulz, Frank Miller, Takashi Murakami, Robert Capa, and Gordon Parks. The same boundary-crossing mix can be found in our selection of pop culture posters.
An entire gallery on the fifth floor is devoted to monumental storytelling in public spaces. It features material from the archive surrounding Judith F. Baca’s mural The History of California, a mural over eight hundred meters long in Los Angeles, alongside large-scale works by Diego Rivera and JR and previously unseen works straight from Banksy’s studio. The fact that documentary photography and street art hang in the same building as 19th-century paintings is the whole point, and it’s the same logic that guides our selection of photographic art.
"The museum turns the question around: instead of asking whether an image is fine enough for art, it asks whether it has told a story to enough people."
The illustrators who waited a century for their own gallery
The clearest reassessment takes place in the galleries devoted to individual American illustrators. Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Jessie Willcox Smith, Maxfield Parrish, Frank Frazetta, and Thomas Hart Benton each have a room of their own – artists whose images reached millions of people every week during the 20th century through magazine covers and book jackets, but whom art history long treated as craftsmen rather than creators. The reason was rarely quality. It was that their images had been commissioned, printed, and distributed instead of hanging alone in a gallery. Our own selection of illustration posters belongs to the same tradition.
Sweden has its own version of this story. Elsa Beskow, John Bauer, and Ottilia Adelborg shaped generations’ visual memories through book illustration, and it was well into the postwar era before their works naturally found their place on museum walls. Today, the trend has reversed: fairy-tale imagery has become sought-after wall art for both children and adults. We have written about this in detail in our guide to Elsa Beskow’s motifs, and matching designs can be found among our children’s prints.
Joseph Campbell’s Library and the Idea That Holds the Museum Together
The museum also houses a research library that is free to visit, with more than 30,000 comic books and a particularly strong collection from the Silver Age of comics. It also holds around 2,900 volumes from mythologist Joseph Campbell’s personal library, many with his own underlining and marginal notes. Campbell formulated the idea of the monomyth, the hero’s journey, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces – the book that influenced George Lucas more than any other when he wrote his films. The collection also includes around 3,000 art books donated by Steve and Ann Martin.
The library explains the museum’s central thesis better than any exhibition text. If the same narrative patterns recur in cave paintings, altarpieces, magazine covers, and movie posters, then visual storytelling is not a genre but a basic human function. At the same time, the museum points out the uncomfortable truth: the very same tools have been used by church and state to convey values, assert power, and define what people should believe. The narrative image is therefore never neutral, whether it hangs in a chapel or above a sofa.
Among the more unusual features are two cinemas that function as screening rooms rather than separate showings: visitors can come and go freely, and the films range from a few minutes to an hour and a half. One is named after documentary film pioneer Robert Flaherty and shows films about the history of visual storytelling and the artists featured in the exhibitions. The other bears the name of Slavko Vorkapich, the experimental filmmaker who created montage sequences and effects for Hollywood from the 1920s through the 1940s and later headed the film department at the university George Lucas himself would attend. Here, too, the thesis is the same: technology is storytelling’s tool, not its opposite.
Tip: Try the museum’s approach on your own wall. Stand in front of it and ask yourself what the images say together, in the order your eye reads them. If the answer is “nothing in particular,” it’s usually not because of the images but because of their order. Rearrange them so the image with the most going on is where your gaze lands first, and let the quieter images support it from the sides.
What a museum for narrative images means for the walls in your home
The timing is no coincidence. Trend reports for 2026 point in the same direction: Pinterest’s home decor forecast highlights a more theatrical, expressive maximalism, while 1stDibs’ annual survey of interior designers put maximalism, chocolate brown, and vintage finds at the top of the list. The common thread is that the home should tell a personal story instead of looking like a page from a catalog. A museum that gives illustration, comics, and poster art the same status as painting makes exactly the same move, but in an institutional setting.
In practical terms, this means you can choose images with a story, not just ones in the right color. An image where something actually happens—a meeting, a journey, a moment before something—stands up to being seen again every day in a different way from a purely formal composition. This is especially true in rooms where you sit still for a long time. If you hang several images together, it pays to let them follow a progression through time or place, much like panels in a comic. You’ll find plenty of images with that kind of built-in story among our retro and vintage posters.
If you want to understand why this reappraisal has taken so long, two of our earlier articles make good reading: our overview of the history of wall art, from cave paintings to gallery walls and our article on the history of the poster, which describes how the printed image first entered the art world around the turn of the 20th century. In practice, Lucas Museum is the next chapter in the same story.
Frequently asked questions about the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
If you want to read the original source, the museum's own presentation of the opening is available at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, and ArchDaily has an overview of the architecture. And if you'd rather bring the idea home than buy a plane ticket, start with a poster that tells you something you'd actually want to see every day. Our illustration posters are a great starting point, and one well-chosen image in 50x70 does more for a room than five images chosen for their colors.