For eight years, something pale and curving has been growing out of a former parking lot in Exposition Park, visible from the 110 and impossible to categorize from a distance.
Angelenos have called it a spaceship, a cloud, a wave. On Tuesday, September 22, it finally opens, and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art becomes the most ambitious new cultural institution in America.
It is worth saying plainly what this building is for, because the shorthand everyone reaches for is wrong.
This is not a Star Wars museum. It is a billion-dollar argument that art doesn’t need to be highbrow to be respected. The traditional model that puts oil painting at the top and comics somewhere near the service entrance.
A building designed without a single straight line
Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, working with Stantec, has produced something genuinely unlike anything else in the American museum landscape. The 300,000-square-foot structure lifts at its center and touches the park at only a few points, creating a sheltered plaza underneath. Its central arch spans 185 feet. Four stories overhead, an elliptical oculus opens the whole thing to the sky.
The skin is more than 1,200 curved panels of fiberglass-reinforced polymer, each one uniquely shaped, each placed to complete a form that would have been unbuildable a decade ago.
Ma has described his intent as making a building as light and free as a cloud, and as building a scene rather than a structure. Whether you find the result sublime or slightly alien, it does the thing great architecture is supposed to do. It refuses to look like anything that came before it.
Check out the gallery below to see the images large.
More than 1,300 works, and a first floor that borrows the world
The inaugural exhibitions unfold across 100,000 square feet and more than thirty galleries. They begin on the ground floor with The History of Narrative Art: Heroes • Myths • The Sacred, which traces visual storytelling back tens of thousands of years and makes the museum’s central claim: that pictures have always been how humans build belief, and that church and state alike understood this long before anyone was arguing about whether illustration counts as art.
The most quietly remarkable thing about this gallery is how it was assembled. The museum partnered with the Vatican Museums, the Louvre, the National Museum and Research Center of Altamira, and Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia to produce faithful reproductions of works that cannot travel: the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the winged human-headed bulls from the Palace of Sargon II, Altamira’s cave paintings, the Aztec Sun Stone.
The high-resolution scans the museum made in the process were donated back to each partner institution. It is a genuinely generous piece of cultural infrastructure disguised as an exhibition design decision.
Upstairs, the fourth and fifth floors organize the collection by theme, medium, and individual artist. Galleries named for love, family, community, work, play, and adventure hold Vincent van Gogh beside Beatrix Potter, George Bellows beside Ernie Barnes, Jacob Lawrence beside Charles White. Genre galleries covering fantasy, romance, and adventure bring in George Méliès, Boris Vallejo, Julie Bell, and Ken Kelly. Medium-specific rooms for comics, manga, graphic novels, photography, and murals gather George Herriman, Charles Schulz, Jim Lee, Frank Miller, Takashi Murakami, Robert Capa, and Gordon Parks.
Six twentieth-century American illustrators get solo galleries: Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Jessie Willcox Smith, Maxfield Parrish, Frank Frazetta, and Thomas Hart Benton. Giving Frazetta a room of his own inside a major museum is, on its own, a small revolution.
The fifth-floor mural gallery may be the most quietly radical space in the building. It centers Judith F. Baca’s archive from The History of California, the half-mile Great Wall of Los Angeles, alongside work by Diego Rivera, JR, and never-before-seen pieces acquired directly from Banksy’s studio.
Star Wars, kept in proportion
The Lucas Archives are here, and the cinema gallery opens with Star Wars in Motion, an exhibition built entirely around land vehicles from the first six films. Concept art, props, and costumes run from Luke’s landspeeder in A New Hope to the first physical build of General Grievous’s wheel bike from Revenge of the Sith.
Outside, ten monumental sculptures sit along the park’s walkways, and several are unmistakably from the saga: Padmé fighting off a nexu, Leia freeing herself from Jabba, Yoda meeting Grogu. They share the lawn with Fernando Botero’s Maternity, Antonin Mercié’s David After the Combat, Prune Nourry’s Terracotta Daughters, and Benjamin Victor’s Rosie the Riveter.
Critics have spent a decade calling this a vanity project, and the sculpture garden is where that reading finds its easiest evidence. The more interesting response is that the juxtaposition is the whole point. Putting Leia twenty feet from Botero is not a lapse in curatorial judgment. It is the thesis statement, installed in bronze, in a public park you can walk through for free.
Thirteen acres that used to be asphalt
Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA replaced a parking lot with a thirteen-acre campus: more than 300 new trees including jacarandas, oaks, and pines, indigenous and drought-tolerant plantings, a hanging garden, an amphitheater, a meadow, and a fountain conceived as a waterfall. The contoured topography deliberately echoes California’s own range of foothills, valleys, mesas, and canyons.
For South Los Angeles, a neighborhood with a documented shortage of park space, this may end up mattering more than anything hanging on the walls.
The library nobody is talking about
Free to every visitor, spread across a curved reading room and two floors above it, the Research Library holds more than 30,000 comic books with real depth in the Silver Age, the archives of Kitchen Sink Press, roughly 3,000 art books donated by Steve Martin and Ann Martin, and selections from the Skywalker Ranch Library.
Its centerpiece is more than 2,900 volumes from Joseph Campbell’s personal library, many carrying his own annotations and research notes. The intellectual source code for the hero’s journey, and by extension for Star Wars itself, is now sitting on open shelves in South Los Angeles for anyone who walks in. For students of mythology and storytelling, that is the single most valuable thing in the building.
If you are going
The museum opens to the public Tuesday, September 22, 2026, in Exposition Park, next to the Natural History Museum and the Coliseum. Opening day has sold out, and demand through late September has been heavy, though availability opens up from October onward. Two theaters, the Robert Flaherty and the Slavko Vorkapich, run continuous drop-in film programs. Skywalker Grill, designed by Rockwell Group, sits on top with city views and stays open past museum hours.
Photography © Patrick Price and Adam Amengual.
