The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens to the public on Tuesday, Sept. 22, three days after George Lucas and Mellody Hobson hosted an invitation-only opening-night celebration in Exposition Park on Saturday evening, Sept. 19. The museum’s own announcement named eight co-chairs for the evening: Julie Bell, Tom Cruise, Greta Gerwig, Jensen Huang, JR, Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro and Pharrell Williams. MyNewsLA, citing museum representatives on the day of the event, listed a ninth, Sir Lewis Hamilton. The museum cost roughly $1 billion, funded entirely by Lucas and Hobson. It covers 300,000 square feet across five levels, and it reached opening day only after San Francisco turned the project down and a lawsuit drove it out of Chicago.
What it costs and how to get in
General admission is $25 for adults and $21 for seniors 65 and older; anyone 17 or younger gets in free. Members, active-duty military and holders of the museum’s LM37 neighborhood pass also pay nothing. The museum’s FAQ page states the rule most visitors will not expect: “Everyone–including members and accompanying children and infants of all ages–will need to book timed-entry tickets in advance.” A free account is required to reserve one. The FAQ is direct about that too: “All sales are final and non-transferable. There are no refunds, transfers, or exchanges for tickets.” Tickets are on sale now for visits between Sept. 22, 2026 and Feb. 28, 2027, the museum says, from a batch released on July 21; more dates are to follow. (Its live ticketing page labels the general-admission product a “22 September – 30 December” run, a shorter window than the February date the museum’s own ticket pages give. The museum has not explained the difference.)
Residents of the 90037 ZIP code — roughly 65,000 people, per The Art Newspaper — can register for a free LM37 pass admitting the holder plus one guest, with proof of address required on the first visit; the museum held a Community Preview Day for neighbors on Sunday, Sept. 13. California EBT cardholders can claim two free adult tickets through a promo code tied to their card number, and caregivers accompanying a visitor with a disability get in free. Parking is paid, through two lots on site and four more in Exposition Park; the museum says that revenue “remains in Exposition Park to support the park and state museums.”
Not everything needs a ticket. The shop, café, Skywalker Grill restaurant, Park and Gardens and the research library are open without one. General admission covers the galleries, exhibitions and theaters on Levels 1, 4 and 5 only; paid programs are separate.
The Tuesday question
Here is where a ticket-buyer should slow down. The museum’s posted weekly hours are Monday 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; Tuesday closed; Wednesday 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; Thursday 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; Friday 10 a.m.–9 p.m.; Saturday 9 a.m.–9 p.m.; Sunday 9 a.m.–5 p.m., with last entry 45 minutes before closing. The museum has not published separate hours for opening day itself. Yet the museum opens to the public on a Tuesday, and its live ticketing system sells a run beginning “22 September” — also a Tuesday. The museum has not published anything explaining whether Sept. 22 is a one-time exception to the Tuesday closure or whether the closure takes effect on some later date. Anyone booking a visit for a Tuesday further out than this week should check the museum’s site before showing up.
What is inside
The inaugural exhibitions draw on what The Art Newspaper describes as more than 1,200 objects from Lucas and Hobson’s 40,000-piece private collection, arranged across 35 galleries; MyNewsLA has separately reported more than 1,300 works. The two figures conflict, so the number here is The Art Newspaper’s, attributed. The galleries are organized by theme — “play,” “love,” “family,” “adventure” — rather than by chronology or by artist. Named artists on view include Artemisia Gentileschi, Norman Rockwell, Frida Kahlo, Robert Colescott, Frank Frazetta and Robert Crumb, plus, per The Art Newspaper, Maxfield Parrish and a Mary Cassatt, along with the complete Lucas Archives spanning 1971 to 2012.
Two 299-seat theaters are named for documentarian Robert J. Flaherty and montage filmmaker Slavko Vorkapich. The Flaherty shows documentaries, including one commissioned for the museum and titled, per The Art Newspaper, “Seeing Is Believing: The Story of Narrative Art.” The Vorkapich screens what The Art Newspaper calls “the emotion of motion” — silent films by Méliès and Émile Cohl, episodes of “Cowboy Bebop,” Man Ray’s experimental work and Lucas’s own student films.
Some Star Wars production pieces are on display, including General Grievous’s wheel bike from “Revenge of the Sith,” part of the inaugural cinema exhibition “Star Wars in Motion,” announced May 4 and built around vehicle designs, props, costumes and illustrations from the franchise’s first six films. The main gallery holds more of it — “R2-D2 and Darth Vader’s suit to podracers galore,” per The Hollywood Reporter’s Sept. 3, 2026 review — shown as part of that same exhibit. But Lucas, per The Art Newspaper, “has been adamant that this is not a Star Wars museum.” Senior curator Ryan Linkof, who joined the museum in 2018 as its first curator, offers the fuller definition: “Narrative art is rooted in storytelling; it is art that translates words into images. While all art has a story, not all art is about stories.”
The building, designed by Ma Yansong of MAD with Stantec, sits on a 13-acre campus with a Park and Gardens designed by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA. Ma described the design’s logic to The Art Newspaper: “In Los Angeles, you need a canopy, you need shading, you need the architecture to protect people from the sun. So this building is like a big tree. It’s elevated. It’s floating. And it casts a shadow for people underneath.”
How it got here
Exposition Park is not where Lucas first tried to build this. In 2014, the Presidio Trust in San Francisco rejected all three finalist proposals for a site at mid-Crissy Field, Lucas’s among them, saying it did “not believe any of the projects were right for this location.” Lucas’s spokesman, David Perry, said at the time: “a lot of other people have asked us to dance, and we will start calling them back.” Lucas then took the project to Chicago, where in 2016 the advocacy group Friends of the Parks sued over a proposed lakefront site. A federal judge’s injunction blocked construction while the case proceeded, and Lucas and Hobson abandoned Chicago for California. Exposition Park was announced as the Los Angeles site in January 2017. Ground was broken in March 2018. The museum was originally set to open in 2021 and was delayed repeatedly: construction was significantly slowed by the Covid-19 pandemic, and there were conflicts between architects and contractors, according to The Art Newspaper. Whatever the count of postponements, the span is not in dispute — ground broken in March 2018, doors open this Tuesday.
The leadership churned late. On Feb. 28, 2025, Lucas and Hobson announced that Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the museum’s director and CEO for five years, would step aside as of April 1, and that her job would be split in two: Lucas taking content direction, and Jim Gianopulos, the former chairman and chief executive of 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures, serving as interim CEO during a search for a permanent one. That May, the museum laid off 15 full-time and seven part-time employees, most of them in education and museum services. Tracey Bates, who had advised Lucas and Hobson on the museum since 2020, was named CEO on July 9, 2026.
At the museum’s press preview on Wednesday, Sept. 2, Lucas summed up the 17 years in his own words: “This has been a long haul. Seventeen years between getting kicked out of cities and trying to get this built, which has in itself been eight years.” He added: “Part of the problem is I’m a contrarian. I don’t like to do things that people think can be done.” And, on the toll of it: “I’m used to doing the impossible. This one almost broke my will.”
At a separate, smaller “friends and family” preview the following night — Thursday, Sept. 3, sixteen days before Saturday’s Sept. 19 gala, and not the gala itself — Mellody Hobson spoke about watching Lucas build the museum: “I watched George up close. I wasn’t there for ‘Star Wars.’ I saw genius work, genuinely work, and it was awe inspiring. And he was fanatical at times, but the thing about a fanatical person is they’re a fan.” (Variety, Marc Malkin, Sept. 4, 2026)
The argument about the premise
Not everyone has been won over by the idea behind the museum. In 2017 — nine years before the building existed — Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight called it a “bad idea” and a “vanity museum,” writing: “Narrative art is a made-up category. ‘Narrative art is visual art that tells a story,’ [the Lucas Museum’s website] explains, merely repeating the same concept twice with different phrasing. A perfect tautology—that’s nothing to build an art museum around.” The museum’s own people see it differently. CEO Tracey Bates told The Art Newspaper: “From the beginning, George and Mellody have had a clear vision for the mission of the museum: to platform and celebrate illustrators and artists whose work traditional institutions have often overlooked or excluded.” Knight wrote his critique in 2017, about a museum that did not yet exist. Critics who have since walked the finished galleries have filed their own verdicts: The Hollywood Reporter’s review, published Sept. 3, 2026, called the museum “a striking throwback to the rich, eccentric autodidact’s cabinet-of-curiosities concept associated with Gilded Age figures like Henry Clay Frick, Henry Huntington and P.T. Barnum.”
What happens next
The museum opens to the public Tuesday, Sept. 22. Tickets are available now for visits through Feb. 28, 2027, and the museum says more dates will be released later. Until then, anyone planning a visit needs a free account and a timed ticket booked in advance — a rule that applies to every visitor, members and free-admission children included, with no refunds once booked.
Sources and further reading
- Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Opens to the Public on September 22, 2026
- Plan Your Visit — admission, timed entry and what a ticket includes
- FAQs — ticketing, refunds and children’s admission
- Hours and Location
- Lucas Museum of Narrative Art to Welcome and Celebrate Its South LA Neighbors with Free Admission for 90037 Residents
- Introducing Tracey Bates, CEO of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
- The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art’s Inaugural Cinema Exhibition, “Star Wars in Motion”