lucas museum

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on Thursday announced its inaugural film programming, which will be screened nonstop during museum hours in two dedicated 299-seat theaters. Entry to the theaters is included with each general admission ticket, and visitors can enter and exit at any time, creating a free-flowing set of ancillary exhibition spaces with a goal of furthering the museum’s mission of exploring storytelling in its many forms.

One of the theaters will play museum co-founder George Lucas’ student films, made between 1965 and 1969, among other rare offerings. A schedule of screenings will be provided to visitors as they enter so they can plan their day around what they’d like to see, and programming will be changed periodically through the year. The theaters will also be used for special events.

“The film program, like so much in the museum, is unique in its structure and content. It is an open-door program that runs continuously throughout the day, allowing people to come and go at their leisure,” Ryan Linkof, senior curator and head of the museum’s film programs, wrote in an email. The news was first revealed Thursday during a Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con. “In this way, it fits within the larger mission of the museum to allow visitors to choose their own path through the museum and discover content at their own pace. It is also a varied and diverse program that includes everything from the earliest cinema experiments to avant-garde film, documentaries and animation, providing a platform for many underrecognized and rarely seen films and filmmakers.”

Adjacent to each other on the ground floor, off the north lobby of the $1-billion museum, the theaters are named after two giants of film history: Robert J. Flaherty, whose 1922 silent film “Nanook of the North” revolutionized documentary filmmaking; and early Hollywood montagist, cinematic artist and experimental filmmaker Slavko Vorkapich, who also served as chair of the USC film department from 1948 to 1950, more than a decade before Lucas enrolled in the program.

Two 299-seat theaters will be located on the ground floor of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which opens to the public Sept. 22.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

The Flaherty theater will be dedicated to documentaries, including those that chronicle the work and artistic process of many of the artists and storytellers featured in the museum’s opening exhibitions such as Norman Rockwell, Jim Lee, Charles M. Schulz, Maurice Sendak, Diego Rivera, J.C. Leyendecker and Weegee. The museum will also screen “Seeing Is Believing: The Story of Narrative Art,” a new documentary series it commissioned from Robin Dashwood. It will also show episodes of the 2024 television series “The Power of Film,” created by Howard Suber and directed by Laura Gabbert, and the 1988 Ron Mann-directed doc “Comic Book Confidential.”

The experience will be more avant-garde in the Vorkapich theater, which will contain programming “showcasing cinematic innovation and imagination through experimental and formally inventive short films that speak to the essence of cinema: the magic of seeing still images come to life,” wrote Linkof.

Offerings include Lucas’ student films, as well as montage sequences by Vorkapich for movies like “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”; silent films by Georges Méliès, Émile Cohl, W.K.L. Dickson, Edwin S. Porter and more; early animations by Winsor McCay; experimental films created by Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy; early sound animations by Walt Disney and Fleischer Studios; experimental films by Canadian animator Norman McLaren; Looney Tunes cartoons; abstract “visual music” works by Mary Ellen Bute, Oskar Fischinger, Jordan Belson and others; excerpts from Busby Berkeley musicals; experimental films from the 1960s by Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger; experimental animation by Vince Collins; “Cowboy Bebop”; and an episode of “Star Wars: Visions.”

The Lucas Museum opens Sept. 22. Tickets went on sale Tuesday and were going briskly, with digital wait times reported of more than four hours in queues with as many as 13,000 guests. Museum representatives declined to comment on how many sold that first day, noting, “We’re grateful for the response and early enthusiasm from our Founding Member community and first wave of visitors. We look forward to welcoming them in September.”

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which is moving at light speed toward its Sept. 22 opening, announced Thursday that it will give free annual passes to its South L.A. neighbors living in the 90037 ZIP Code. The 300,000-square-foot, $1-billion museum located in Exposition Park will also host a special community preview day on Sept. 13, more than a week before the general public gets to step inside.

The 90037 ZIP Code has a population of more than 65,000 and is bordered roughly by the 110 Freeway to the west, Slauson Avenue to the south, Central Avenue to the east and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to the north. Residents can register for passes at lucasmuseum.org/lm37 and will be alerted in August when the program launches. Pass holders can reserve tickets for themselves and one guest.

Tickets for non-pass holders go on sale July 21. They cost $25 for adults and $21 for seniors. Kids 17 and under are free.

“Storytelling has the power to bring people together and create a sense of community,” said Lucas Museum Chief Executive Tracey Bates in a news release about the program. “Through LM37, we are inviting our South Los Angeles neighbors to make the museum part of their lives and take their own path of discovery through the art, programs and experiences that will help shape this new cultural hub for Los Angeles.”

The community preview day is designed to give local business owners, community partners, civic leaders and registered LM37 pass holders a sneak peak of the 10,000 square feet of exhibition space, as well as the expansive gardens with 11 acres of park space.

The opening programming, curated by co-founder George Lucas, features 20 inaugural exhibitions across more than 30 galleries, including one titled “Star Wars in Motion,” containing vehicle designs, high-speed racers, flying vessels, props, costumes and illustrations from the first six films in the beloved franchise.

More than 1,200 objects will be on display from Lucas’ personal collection of narrative art. Highlights include work by Norman Rockwell and Dorothea Lange, as well as a variety of manga, children’s book illustrations and comics.

It will be more than a “Star Wars” bonanza when the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens to the public Sept. 22. The highly anticipated $1-billion museum on Thursday announced about 20 inaugural exhibitions curated by George Lucas across more than 30 galleries — and only one is related to cinema, with a focus on “Star Wars” memorabilia, including large-scale vehicle installations, production designs, props and costumes.

The full scope of the 1,200-plus objects will only be revealed when guests step through the museum doors into more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space on the first day of fall.

The futuristic-looking 300,000-square-foot museum in L.A.’s Exposition Park was designed by Ma Yansong of Mad Architects with executive architect Stantec and includes 11 acres of park space that extend to the museum’s roof, designed by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA. Co-founded by Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, the museum will rotate the famous filmmaker’s vast collection of narrative art, which contains objects not found in more traditional museums, including manga, comics and children’s tales. The idea is to present the myriad ways images are used to tell an endless variety of stories. Lucas has called his collection “the people’s art.”

Dorothea Lange, “Migrant Mother,” Nipomo, Calif., 1936. Gelatin silver print, 18 3/4 x 14 1/2 in.

(Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, PKY.1062)

Exhibitions currently on deck include a variety of themed shows such as one on the architecture of the building; one titled “Everyday Life,” dedicated to visual stories about “childhood, community, family, love, motherhood, play, school, sports and work”; another titled “Civic Life” featuring “artists’ portrayals of experience in the courthouse, the polling place, the political headquarters”; an exhibit titled “Narrative Forms” highlighting “narrative art across genres of adventure, fantasy, romance and science fiction” by artists including Julie Bell, Boris Vallejo, Ken Kelly, Georges Méliès, John C. Berkey and Jeffrey Catherine Jones; and children’s literature illustrations by Beatrix Potter, Leo Politi, E.H. Shepard and Jacob Lawrence.

George Hughes, “Home at Last,” cover for the Saturday Evening Post, Sept. 1, 1951. Oil on board, 30 x 24 in.

(Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, PKY.993. © SEPS by Curtis Licensing)

There will also be exhibitions devoted to the work of individual artists and genres such as comics and graphic stories from illustrators Mœbius, Marie Severin, Jack Kirby, Alison Bechdel, Jim Lee, Frank Miller and Rafael Navarro; illustrations and book covers by Frank Frazetta; the work of fairy tale and children’s illustrator Jessie Willcox Smith; the lush art of Maxfield Parrish; a selection of work by iconic American artist Norman Rockwell; selected works of Thomas Hart Benton; and early 20th century book illustrations by N.C. Wyeth.

A news release about the inaugural exhibitions noted that they are drawn from the museum’s founding collection of more than 40,000 works.

“The exhibitions trace the evolution of human culture through storytelling, from ancient sculptures of gods and goddesses to Renaissance paintings to photographs, comics and modern cinema,” the release says. “Many exhibitions are organized by theme, focusing on myths about love, family, community and adventure that connect every generation. These shared stories, told over and over in many forms, bind us together and define our human experience.”

Ernie Barnes, “The Critic’s Corner,” 2007. Acrylic on canvas, 23 1/2 x 35 3/8 in.

(Matt Kroening / Lucas Museum of Narrative Art)

The road to the opening of the Lucas Museum has been winding. In 2017, Lucas first announced his decision to build his museum in L.A., with construction beginning the following year. The building was initially scheduled to open in 2021 — a goal that was pushed to 2023 due to COVID-19 pandemic-induced delays. From there, the debut was pushed to 2025, and finally 2026. The museum announced its final opening date last November.

Lucas’ role at his namesake museum has also not always been clear, and the museum’s development has been marked by a series of high-profile staff shakeups. The museum’s original director and chief executive, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, stepped down from her role in early 2025 after less than five years. She didn’t speak publicly about her departure but the museum issued a statement that her decision was based on a “new organizational design” that would split her job into two positions, with Lucas responsible for content direction.

Three months later, the museum laid off 15 full-time employees, a number of whom were from the education and public programming team. Seven part-time, on-call employees were also eliminated. The layoffs were described to The Times in harrowing terms by two employees who asked to remain anonymous.

In December — soon after the museum announced its opening date — news broke that chief curator Pilar Tompkins Rivas had stepped down from her role.

To date, no new chief curator has been named, but a rep for the museum wrote in an email that Lucas “is responsible for curatorial and content direction for the museum and continues to work closely with the curatorial team on his decades-long vision to celebrate storytelling and narrative art.”