The freshly opened Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has been dubbed many things during its eight-year construction: futuristic, controversial, an alien spaceship, a billion-dollar vanity project. But according to Mellody Hobson, the museum’s co-founder alongside her husband, Hollywood filmmaking legend George Lucas, the endeavor is like “stepping into George’s mind.”
“We’ve been working on this project together, basically, as long as I’ve known him,” Hobson told the Wall Street Journal. For the record, that would be 21 years – the couple first crossed paths at a business conference in 2005. “George had decided that he was going to build a museum a very long time ago… [it’s] very cool, very creative, unexpected… the detail is so nuanced.”
A museum from the mind of the man who changed science fiction forever was never going to be modest. And with construction solely funded by the couple (Hobson is a financial juggernaut who rose from intern at Ariel Investments to its president) and the 40,000-strong collection primarily from Lucas’s personal archives obsessively built over half a century – the sky was the limit.
MAD Architects founder Ma Yansong, therefore, conceived the museum as a cloudlike sculpture that appears to hover. It is at once colossal, ethereal, and organic. To protect the $1bn structure, not to mention the priceless artifacts within, the museum is built on a base isolation system engineered to withstand earthquakes, and each of the 1,500 facade panels is custom-made from fiberglass-reinforced polymer to resemble liquid metal. Inside, 35 galleries – which occupy 100,000 of the building’s 300,000 square feet – sit alongside two cinemas, a library, a hanging garden, a restaurant, and a gift shop. And, of course, the entire Lucasfilm archive of original props, concept art, and costumes.
Lucas describes the project as a “temple to the people’s art,” which may seem hard to swallow when the collection includes a $46m Norman Rockwell (one of 57 owned by the filmmaker). But that’s where the somewhat nebulous “narrative art” of it all comes into play. Lucas has a well-documented passion for storytelling and mythmaking, with Luke Skywalker’s hero’s journey arc inspired by comic books and the writings of Joseph Campbell. Yet illustration and photography have long been deemed inferior by the art elite. “Narrative art,” by Lucas’s definition, is a broad spectrum of mediums and voices, and the sheer scale and diversity under the museum’s undulating grass and solar-panel roof speaks to this. Where else would you find cozy Beatrix Potter illustrations alongside the work of Fritz the Cat creator Robert Crumb, or a Frida Kahlo rubbing shoulders with Princess Leia’s bikini?
It seems implausible that, decades earlier, Lucas’s passion project was rejected by two cities: San Francisco, then Chicago. Today, the building occupies an 11-acre site in LA’s Exposition Park – transforming an erstwhile concrete parking lot into one of the most ambitious architectural and cultural endeavors of the 21st century.
The museum’s price tag and audacious architecture will continue to raise eyebrows but, ultimately, the vision is deeply personal and not driven by commerce. Hobson and Lucas have vowed to make their paean to the art of storytelling accessible, with an inaugural scheme offering free passes to residents of the surrounding 90037 zip code.
“We’ve always said we’re holding society’s money – which we fully intend to give back,” explains Hobson. “This is how we’re doing it.”
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