Lucas Museum Opens in LA as a 'Temple to the People's Art'

After 17 years and $1 billion, George Lucas's Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened Tuesday in Los Angeles, blending Kahlo, Rockwell, Banksy and Star Wars.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened to the public Tuesday in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, near George Lucas's alma mater USC. The Associated Press, via the Indiana Gazette Online, reports the $1 billion project was first conceived 17 years ago for San Francisco and Chicago, reaching design phases in both cities before Lucas says he was 'kicked out' of each. The 82-year-old 'Star Wars' creator called it a 'temple to the people's art' and a project that 'almost broke my will.' He and wife Mellody Hobson filled its galleries almost entirely with their own collections, making the museum the life's work of the couple.

The museum's defining gamble, per the AP's report, is its deliberate blur of populist and fine art. A Frida Kahlo self-portrait hangs steps from Cassius Marcellus Coolidge's 1894 'Poker Game' — the dogs-playing-cards painting often dismissed as kitsch, here treated as the first of 18 oils on the theme. On the fifth floor, two walls of stenciled murals by the once-anonymous, recently 'unmasked' Banksy — who worked personally with Lucas — include his girl releasing a heart-shaped balloon, near works by Judith Baca and Diego Rivera. Norman Rockwell hangs alongside commercial illustrators and comic artists.

Among the standout works is Kahlo's 1940 'Self Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser,' acquired in 2020. According to the Indiana Gazette Online's account of the AP story, the museum's then-director called it 'the Mona Lisa of Mexico' for good reason: it is one of few such portraits held outside her native country. It shows Kahlo with flowers in her hair, a thorn necklace dripping blood, and silver earrings that were a gift from Pablo Picasso — whose work is also in the collection — dedicated to Dr. Leo Eloesser, her doctor and best friend.

'Star Wars' is present but deliberately a small fraction of the holdings. Outside, visitors find 'The Hutt Slayer,' a commissioned sculpture of Princess Leia choking Jabba the Hutt from 1983's 'Return of the Jedi,' plus statues of Yoda, Grogu and Natalie Portman's Padmé Amidala along garden paths. Inside, the inaugural 'Star Wars in Motion' show displays vehicles from the original trilogy, and a Naboo starfighter hangs in the library lobby. Architect Ma Yansong designed the billowing building, likened to a cloud, with a celestial oculus he described to the AP as 'almost like a spiritial space.'

The Atlanta Voice separately reports that Atlanta's High Museum of Art opened 'Martin Puryear: Nexus' on Friday, the most comprehensive presentation of the sculptor's career in more than two decades and its exclusive Southeast stop after Boston and Cleveland. More than 70 works spanning five decades run through January 17, 2027, from Peace Corps-era Sierra Leone drawings to pieces from his 2019 Venice Biennale U.S. Pavilion. Curator Michael Rooks told the Voice the show highlights craft traditions 'still very much alive' in the Southeast and introduced Puryear's foundational 'A Column for Sally Hemings' and 'Big Phrygian' to younger Atlanta audiences.