George Lucas and Mellody Hobson will host an opening-night celebration Saturday night for the long-awaited Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, giving invited guests an early look at the Exposition Park museum three days before it opens to the public.
The event will be co-chaired by Julie Bell, Tom Cruise, Guillermo del Toro, Greta Gerwig, Sir Lewis Hamilton, Jensen Huang, JR, Steven Spielberg and Pharrell Williams, according to museum representatives.
The celebration is expected to bring together artists, filmmakers, philanthropists and other guests for an early look inside the museum, which officially opens to the public Tuesday.
Founded by Lucas and Hobson, the five-story, 300,000-square-foot museum is devoted to visual storytelling across cultures, centuries and media, with works ranging from paintings, illustrations and photography to comics, murals and cinema.
“The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art was created to honor humanity’s stories and the artists who illustrate them,” Lucas said earlier this month. “The artists in this collection didn’t just create images, they connected our modern imaginations with our ancient emotions — with common beliefs creating community. Their work spans genres, media, and time. They deserve to be in a museum.”
The museum features more than 100,000 square feet of exhibition space across more than 30 galleries, with its inaugural exhibitions presenting more than 1,300 works from the collection, according to the museum.
Artists represented include Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Frank Frazetta, Diego Rivera, Gordon Parks, Charles Schulz, Robert Crumb and Judith F. Baca.
The inaugural exhibitions trace the history of narrative art, beginning with a first-floor exhibition exploring heroes, myths and sacred imagery across thousands of years. Other galleries focus on themes including love, family and community, fantasy, romance and adventure.
The museum’s cinema collection includes the complete Lucas Archives from 1971 to 2012. An inaugural exhibition titled “Star Wars in Motion” features concept designs, props and costumes associated with vehicles from the first six “Star Wars” films, including Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder and the first physical build of General Grievous’ Wheel Bike.
“We wanted a museum unlike any other — one that brings people from every walk of life through the same doors,” Hobson said earlier this month. “That’s why this collection holds so many different kinds of stories: so that more people can walk in and, somewhere in these galleries, see themselves — and the world they know — reflected back.”
The building was designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects with Stantec and features a curving exterior clad in more than 1,200 individually shaped panels. A central arch spanning 185 feet rises above a public plaza.
The museum is surrounded by a new 13-acre park and gardens designed by landscape architect Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA on land that was previously an asphalt parking lot. The grounds include more than 300 newly planted trees, an amphitheater, a meadow, a hanging garden and 10 monumental outdoor sculptures.
The museum also features two theaters, a research library that is free to the public and Skywalker Grill, a full-service restaurant open to museum visitors and the general public.
The research library includes more than 30,000 comic books, select holdings from the Skywalker Ranch Library, about 3,000 art books donated by Steve Martin and his wife, Ann Stringfield, and more than 2,900 volumes from the personal library of writer and mythologist Joseph Campbell, whose work influenced Lucas’ creation of “Star Wars,” museum officials said.
