{"id":1911194,"date":"2026-04-30T16:10:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T13:10:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1911194"},"modified":"2026-04-30T16:10:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T13:10:17","slug":"lucas-museum-reveals-first-set-of-exhibitions-curated-by-george-lucas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1911194","title":{"rendered":"Lucas Museum Reveals First Set of Exhibitions Curated by George Lucas"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tWith just under five months to go before its September opening, the forthcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles has announced a selection of exhibitions that will inaugurate the new institution, all of which are curated by cofounder George Lucas.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe initial hang of the Lucas Museum will feature around 12,000 objects, drawn from the museum\u2019s holdings of more than 40,000 objects, that Lucas began collecting over 50 years ago. They will be spread across 30 galleries in the museum\u2019s 300,000-square-foot building, which sits on the edge of LA\u2019s Exposition Park and includes an 11-acre campus.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn its announcement Thursday, the Lucas has revealed the thematic compositions of the majority of these galleries, which range from focuses on specific artists to medium-specific hangs. Artists that Lucas has deep holdings of, like Thomas Hart Benton, Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, and Maxfield Parrish, will get their own galleries, as will illustrators like Frank Frazetta and Jessie Willcox Smith, the sole woman to get such treatment.<\/p>\n

\n\tOther rooms will be dedicated to architecture, cinema, photography, muralism, comics and graphic stories, magna and anime, and children\u2019s stories. The cinema section will draw from the Lucas Archives\u2019 holdings of production designs, costumes, and props, while the muralism section will feature preparatory sketches by artists like Judith F. Baca, Diego Rivera, and JR. Documentary images by Robert Capa, Gordon Parks, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Dorothea Lange will make-up the photography section.<\/p>\n

\n\tTwo larger themes will take over a series of galleries\u00a0 that will explore subsections within those areas of study. \u201cEveryday life,\u201d for example, will look at \u201cChildhood,\u201d \u201cMotherhood,\u201d \u201cLove,\u201d and \u201cPlay,\u201d among others, while \u201cNarrative Forms\u201d will be broken up into \u201cAdventure,\u201d\u00a0\u201cFantasy,\u201d\u00a0\u201cRomance,\u201d and\u00a0\u201cScience Fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"An<\/div>\n<\/div>
N. C. Wyeth, For a mile, or thereabouts, my raft went very well<\/em>, illustration for Robinson Crusoe<\/em>, 1920.<\/span>Lucas Museum of Narrative Art<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tLooking more broadly are galleries for \u201cWestern Stories,\u201d which a release describes as focusing on \u201cmyths of the American West, including wagon trains, shoot-outs, frontier towns, and more\u201d; \u201cHistory,\u201d featuring \u201cpaintings, prints, and illustrations telling (and pointedly re-telling) the stories of major historical events\u201d; and \u201cCivic Life,\u201d with \u201cartists\u2019 portrayals of experience in the courthouse, the polling place, the political headquarters, and more.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cContemporary vehicles of visual storytelling such as illustration, comics, and graphic stories have not always received the respect they deserve,\u201d a press release reads about this initial hang. \u201cThe Lucas Museum of Narrative Art creates a home for what George Lucas has called \u2018the people\u2019s art.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe installation strategy is similar to that of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which also bills various of its permanent collection galleries as standalone galleries, as well as the recently opened Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which featured 78 thematic sections across its 110,000 square feet of exhibition space.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat Lucas is being billed as the curator for each of these galleries speaks to the larger leadership changes that he has implemented at the museum in the past year. In February 2025, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the museum\u2019s director and CEO, stepped down as Lucas said that the role managing the museum\u2019s \u201ccontent direction\u201d would now be handled by Lucas himself. Then in November, Lucas Museum chief curator Pilar Tompkins Rivas also departed the institution. Between those two departures, the museum also laid off 15 employees, or about 14 percent of its full-time staff, with cuts primarily impacting its Learning & Engagement and Museum Services teams.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Barnes-community-JPEG-Press-Use.jpg?w=1024″] With just under five months to go before its September opening, the forthcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles has announced a selection of exhibitions that will inaugurate the new institution, all of which are curated by cofounder George Lucas. The initial hang of the Lucas Museum will feature around […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1911194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1911194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1911194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1911194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1911194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}