Lucas Museum Opens: Kahlo, Banksy, and a Mace Windu Double Take

George Lucas's billion-dollar narrative art museum opened in Los Angeles, with Samuel L. Jackson's viral reaction and high-low pairings fans are discussing.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, held its opening night gala on Saturday and opens to the public on Tuesday in Los Angeles' Exposition Park. Yahoo reports that Samuel L. Jackson provided what fans are calling the "perfect reaction" when he stopped dead in his tracks at a life-sized figure of his "Star Wars" character Mace Windu, doing a classic double take before breaking into a wide grin in a viral clip captured by Deadline. Yahoo describes a rooftop aerial spectacle produced by Nova Sky Stories at 9 p.m., narrated live by Oprah Winfrey and Jackson, with drones depicting R2-D2, Captain America, Banksy's Girl with Balloon, and Frida Kahlo tributes. The guest list Yahoo recounts reads like a lifetime achievement roll call: Spielberg, Nolan, Coppola, Peter Jackson, del Toro, Spike Lee, Villeneuve, De Niro, and more.

The opening caps a project that nearly died twice. According to NBC News, the 82-year-old Lucas called the museum a "temple to the people's art" and a project that "almost broke my will," and said he was "kicked out" of both San Francisco and Chicago after the design phase in each city, before landing in Los Angeles near his alma mater USC. Yahoo likewise reports the couple faced legal and political hurdles in both cities before settling on Los Angeles.

For art readers, the hang itself is the story. NBC highlights Frida Kahlo's 1940 "Self Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser" on the fourth floor — acquired in 2020 and one of the few Kahlo self-portraits held outside Mexico, which a former director called "The Mona Lisa of Mexico" — just steps from Cassius Marcellus Coolidge's 1894 "Poker Game," the first of his 18 dogs-playing-poker paintings. On a hard-to-find fifth floor, NBC reports two walls of stenciled Banksy murals, installed after the artist worked personally with Lucas, alongside activist murals by Judith Baca and Diego Rivera. Outdoors, a commissioned sculpture titled "The Hutt Slayer" shows Princess Leia choking Jabba, with Yoda, Grogu, and Padmé statues nearby, while the inaugural "Star Wars in Motion" exhibit shows original-trilogy and prequel vehicles.

The stakes for the museum's argument — that visual storytelling deserves temple-grade architecture and scholarship — rest partly on the building itself. NBC reports architect Ma Yansong designed the billowing structure, which he has likened to a cloud, with a celestial oculus above the main plaza that he told The Associated Press is "almost like a spiritual space," saying "architecture is a narrative, is storytelling." Construction began in early 2018, per NBC. The decisive verdict will come from the paying public, beginning this week in Exposition Park.