MAD's lucas museum in los angeles prepares for 2026 opening

george lucas puts ‘ancient emotions’ inside a new museum

‘The artists in this collection didn’t just create images, they connected our modern imaginations with our ancient emotions,‘ says George Lucas as the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art releases a new set of completed photographs upon its completion. ‘They deserve to be in a museum.‘ Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD with Stantec, the 300,000-square-foot building will open to the public in Los Angeles on September 22nd, 2026.

Founded by Lucas and Mellody Hobson, the institution gathers forms of visual storytelling that have often occupied separate cultural worlds. Paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi and Frida Kahlo appear within the same collection as comics, illustration, murals, photography, and material from the complete Lucas Archives. More than 1,300 works will fill over thirty galleries at opening, occupying approximately 100,000 square feet of the five-story building.

The completed photographs bring the architecture into view beyond its familiar exterior silhouette. Cylindrical glass elevators rise through a tall white lobby, gallery entrances curve into the surrounding walls, and daylight enters through openings shaped without hard corners. Outside, the museum extends across a 13-acre campus where more than 300 newly planted trees have replaced an asphalt parking lot.

‘Stories are mythology, and when illustrated, they help humans understand the mysteries of life,’ continues George Lucas. Hobson adds that the museum seeks to be ‘a museum of the people’s art,’ reflecting visitors’ own experiences.

image © Hufton + Crow

Ma Yansong designs without a single straight line

MAD founder Ma Yansong conceived the Lucas Museum as an extension of the large tree canopies already growing throughout Exposition Park. Its long body rises at the center and meets the ground at a limited number of points, opening a sheltered plaza beneath the galleries. The central arch spans 185 feet between the museum’s north and south lobbies, while an elliptical oculus rises four stories overhead and frames the sky from the ground.

The architects designed the building without a single straight line. More than 1,200 curved panels of fiberglass-reinforced polymer wrap the exterior, each uniquely shaped and positioned within the continuous pale surface. The material weighs less than many conventional cladding systems and can be formed into the smooth geometries that define the museum. A multidisciplinary team of more than 150 people developed the fabrication and construction methods needed to assemble it.

The newly photographed lobby translates the exterior form into a broad interior void. White surfaces sweep upward around a cluster of transparent elevators, while openings on either side draw visitors toward the galleries. Ma approached the museum as an environment that begins within the surrounding park, allowing its surfaces and circulation spaces to prepare visitors for the stories held inside.

Principal spaces on the lower floors include two theaters and a horseshoe-shaped research library overlooking the gardens through floor-to-ceiling windows. Ten studios and classrooms sit alongside a café, shop, learning spaces, and an approximately 10,000-square-foot gallery. Larger exhibition floors occupy the upper levels, suspended above the public plaza and landscape.

image © Hufton + Crow

13 acres of gardens replace an asphalt parking lot

Mia Lehrer and Studio-MLA shaped the surrounding campus as a sequence of rising and dipping landforms. Indigenous and drought-tolerant planting moves through a hanging garden, an amphitheater, open meadow, and waterfall-like fountain. Paths pass below the museum and continue around its perimeter, drawing visitors through the site before they reach either lobby.

The contoured ground refers to California’s foothills, valleys, mesas, and canyons. Jacarandas, oaks, pines, and other tree species distinguish different areas of the park, while grasses and flowering plants change across the seasons. The planting palette responds to a warmer regional climate by conserving water, retaining moisture in the soil, reducing heat, and creating habitat.

Ten monumental sculptures turn the free public park into an outdoor extension of the museum. Fernando Botero’s bronze Maternity appears alongside cinematic figures drawn from the Lucas collection, including Padmé, Princess Leia, Yoda, and Grogu. Other works depict Rosie the Riveter, Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, motion photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and stop-motion animator Willis O’Brien.

From the air, the museum sits inside this new topography as a low silver-white form whose roof continues the lines of the ground below. Trees and planted surfaces climb onto portions of the building, softening the division between architecture and park as the campus stretches toward the surrounding streets of South Los Angeles.

image © Iwan Baan

1,300 works move from cave paintings to Star Wars

The museum’s opening exhibition begins on the first floor with The History of Narrative Art: Heroes • Myths • The Sacred. Original pieces from the collection share the gallery with highly detailed reproductions of artworks and archaeological sites that remain fixed in place around the world.

Created with collaborating institutions, the reproductions include the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Winged Human-Headed Bulls from the Palace of Sargon II, paintings from the Altamira caves, and Mexico’s Aztec Sun Stone. High-resolution photography and 3D scans captured the originals, and the resulting digital material was given to the museums and institutions involved. Visitors can encounter objects separated by thousands of years and vast distances within a single gallery.

The fourth and fifth floors move through themes of family, community, labor, recreation, danger, and adventure. Works by Vincent van Gogh, Jacob Lawrence, Beatrix Potter, Charles White, and Ernie Barnes appear alongside rooms devoted to Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Jessie Willcox Smith, Maxfield Parrish, Frank Frazetta, and Thomas Hart Benton.

Other galleries trace comics, manga, graphic novels, murals, photography, and popular genres including fantasy and romance. A monumental art gallery brings together material from Judith F. Baca’s half-mile-long Great Wall of Los Angeles with work by Diego Rivera and JR. Newly acquired pieces from Banksy’s studio will also appear publicly for the first time.

image © Hufton + Crow

Star Wars vehicles enter the galleries

Drawing from the Lucas Archives, Star Wars in Motion concentrates on land vehicles seen across the first six films in the saga. The exhibition moves from Luke’s Landspeeder in A New Hope to the first physical build of General Grievous’s Wheel Bike for Revenge of the Sith, examining how drawings and fabricated objects transform imagined movement into cinema.

An installation devoted to Ma Yansong treats the architect as a narrative artist within the museum he designed. Project drawings and renderings sit beside photographs of the Lucas Museum and other MAD works, tracing how the studio develops fictional-looking forms into inhabitable structures.

The Robert Flaherty Theater and Slavko Vorkapich Theater operate as continuous, drop-in gallery experiences. One explores documentary cinema and the processes of artists represented throughout the museum. The other concentrates on what the institution calls ‘the emotion of motion,’ moving through experimental uses of light, sound, color, editing, and special effects from cinema’s earliest years onward.

image © Hufton + Crow

a free research library overlooks the park

The horseshoe-shaped Research Library occupies a light-filled reading room on the main level, with two additional floors of material above. Entry will remain free, giving visitors access to general research collections, rare books, archives, and holdings connected to visual storytelling.

More than 30,000 comic books form one of the library’s largest special collections, with particular depth in work from the Silver Age. Select volumes from the former Lucasfilm Research Library reveal source material consulted by Lucas and generations of filmmakers while constructing fictional worlds.

Nearly 2,900 books from mythologist Joseph Campbell’s personal library retain his annotations and research notes. Campbell’s writing on the hero’s journey profoundly influenced Lucas while he developed Star Wars. Approximately 3,000 art books donated by Steve Martin and Ann Martin expand the library further into nineteenth-century art, modernism, and contemporary practice.

Skywalker Grill occupies the top of the museum, with interiors designed by Rockwell Group and panoramic views across Los Angeles. Individually crafted cherrywood panels wrap its walls and ceiling, while softly illuminated white onyx Corian surfaces bring light into the dining room. The restaurant will remain open beyond museum hours and can be visited separately from the galleries.

project info:

project title: Lucas Museum of Narrative Art | @lucasmuseum

architecture: MAD architects | @madarchitects

location: Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California

public opening: September 22nd, 2026

previous coverage: March 2018, February 2020, September 2022, March 2024, March 2025

founding partners: George Lucas, Mellody Hobson

MAD Architects team: Ma Yansong (founder, principal partner), Lu Junliang (Dixon) (associate partner), Lee Flora (associate partner)
architect of record: Stantec (Michael Siegel) | @stantec
landscape architect: Studio-MLA (Mia Lehrer) | @studio_mla
construction manager: JLL (Cory Langer, Dustin Worland)
general contractor: Hathaway Dinwiddie (Rick Cridland)
structural engineer: LERA
mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire life safety: Alfa Tech

MAD Architects partners: Ma Yansong, Dang Qun, Yosuke Hayano

competition and design team: Kin Li, Tiffany Dahlen, Daniel Weber, Jordan Kanter, Daniel Gillen, Wu Kaicong, Zhao Wei, Flora Lee, Jonathan Kontuly, Carmen Carrasco, Jacob Hu, Satoko Narishige, Zhu Yuhao, Casey Kell, Matthew Pugh, Kazushi Miyamoto, Ben Yuqiang, Hiroki Fujino, Chris Nolop, Kek Seow, Younjin Park, Brecht Van Acker, Andrea D’antrassi, Zhang Yiran, Pouya Goshayeshi, Dora Lam, Victor Tung, Steven Park Chaffer, Sean Tan, Sheenam Mujoo, Dookee Chung, Cesar D. Pena Del Rey, Valeria Pestereva, Wang Yiqi, Dmitry Seregin, Lin Yuyang, Che-hung Chien, Zhang Lu, Zeng Hao, Young Koo Kang, Shen Han