Inside LA’s new Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts: So many stories to tell

In the shade of the Lucas Plaza, it’s quiet on a recent day before the Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts opens to the public on Tuesday, Sept. 22, realizing George Lucas and Mellody Hobson‘s long-awaited dream.

There are wonderful museums, large and small, across Southern California. The Lucas Museum is the culmination of 17 years and $1 billion by Lucas, creator of such cinematic worlds as “American Graffiti,” “Star Wars,” “and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and his wife Hobson, a past chair of Starbucks and DreamWorks Animation.

So what’s different inside the Lucas Museum, the architecturally innovative 300,000-square-foot building that sits just west of Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum? What stories do the 40,000 pieces in its collection, more than 1,200 of which are currently on display, tell?

And what does it feel like – physically, emotionally, intellectually –  to spend time at the museum in its 30 galleries, the 11 acres of creatively landscaped greenspace that surround it, the museum store, cafe, theaters?

And, yes, elevators, too, three of which we’re confident are the coolest elevators in any museum you’ve ever visited. You’ll find them in the main hall of the north building, three cylindrical glass elevators inside three glass tubes which look like the transporters on a futuristic spaceship or a row of very large pneumatic tubes, depending on your point of reference.

Let’s take one to the fourth floor where most of the art is exhibited to see what we find.

The main galleries

Earlier this month, Lucas and Hobson addressed the media gathered at the museum for a preview, where Lucas talked about his love for narrative art, and his belief that an illustration, comic panel, street art, or commercial art can be as worthy of the same kind of celebration given to fine artists from Renoir to Degas, Picasso to Warhol.

“It’s something that I felt very, very strongly about in terms of honoring,” Lucas said. “People who are artists, I think, who illustrate stories that are already written, and most of the stories are myths.

“They’re not real,” he said. “But the illustrations make them real.

“As a result, in the beginning, especially for the past 2,000 years, that was the only way you tell a story – with pictures,” Lucas said. “And it’s still that way, because a picture is very powerful, and the stories are very powerful.”

About 30 galleries display the different genres and creators of art that tells a story – narrative art. After stepping out of the glass elevator and peering down a host of dimly lit hallways leading to different galleries, we asked a museum staffer where he’d recommend a new visitor begin.

Start in the Rockwell gallery and then go to the cinema gallery, he suggested, and so we did.

The American artist Norman Rockwell is one of the most recognized artists of the 20th century, and yet his work, which often appeared on the covers of magazines such as “The Saturday Evening Post,” has often been considered more sentimental than serious art.

But here, as we walk through a gallery with dozens of Rockwells hung side by side, the artistic merit is matched by the historic perspective of an American past that is no more. The 1957 painting “After The Prom” shows a teenage couple in formalwear at a soda fountain, the soda jerk smelling her corsage. The whole thing could be a storyboard for Lucas’s “American Graffiti.”

“The Problem We All Live With,” done for a Look magazine series on racism in the early ’60s, shows Ruby Bridges, a young Black girl who in 1960 desegregated the New Orleans elementary school, being escorted to the school by federal agents.

A 1960 study for Rockwell’s “Triple Self-Portrait” is accompanied by an homage in a 2014 piece by Eric Joyner showing a blue retro-style robot in the role of Rockwell as he paints himself by looking into a mirror. In a similar vein, Rockwell’s 1958 painting “The Runaway,” which shows a young boy and a police officer side-by-side on stools at a different soda fountain, is paired with Richard Williams’ 2014-15 painting, “The Militarization of the Police Department – Deadly Force.”

Here, Williams replicates the Rockwell work; only the boy is Black, the police officer is in riot gear, and the same soda jerk now has an expression of wariness or menace. The pairings make clear the art world influence of Rockwell decades after his 1978 death.

The Cinema gallery is a whole different gallery, featuring Lucas’s iconic “Star Wars” franchise through costumes, props, and production paintings and illustrations.

It includes R2-D2 and C-3PO as well as many of the machines of transportation created for the series, from Luke Skywalker’s X-34 Landspeeder in the original movie to speeder bikes raced through the forests of Endor in “Return of the Jedi” to model-sized AT-AT troop transporters.

Fans of the Star Wars universe will, of course, love it, but in contrast to some of the other galleries that debut with the Lucas Museum, it feels more familiar than fresh.

Those other galleries include ones themed around life activities – Work, Love, Family, Sports, for instance – while others collect works focused on different genres of storytelling. Adventure has some terrific pulp fiction-style illustrations and paintings, while Fantasy is next to a small gallery specializing in the works of fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta.

Other single-artist galleries are scattered throughout the museum, including Maxfield Parrish, whose neo-classical works are instantly recognizable for their rich, saturated hues, and N.C. Wyeth, whose illustrations were familiar to generations of children through their use in such books as “Treasure Island,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “The Deerslayer,” and “The Last of the Mohicans.”

Specific types of illustration get their own galleries too. Comics and Graphic Stories are side-by-side on the north end of the fourth floor, featuring work by graphic novelists such as Chris Ware, Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi, and comic book artists as varied as DC Comics’ Jim Lee, underground comic creator R. Crumb, and MAD magazine’s Mort Drucker.

The south end offers galleries on Manga, Children’s Stories, and Photography, the last of which features iconic images and photographers from Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” to multiple images by Gordon Parks, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and more.

At the tiptop

The fifth floor includes just one gallery, and it requires a second elevator on the south end of the fourth floor to access, but the Murals has a number of delights, not least of which is the exhibition of a half a dozen or so large pieces by the mysterious street artist Banksy.

Just as a new work by Banksy typically appears on a wall or public place with no prior notice, the fact that the Lucas Museum had multiple works by the elusive British artist wasn’t publicly known until the media preview on Sept. 2.

The works include “Girl with Balloon,” a stencil of a child in black-and-white reaching out as a red heart-shaped balloon floats away. It’s presented here on a large section of wall, the plaster crumbled at one corner to reveal the bricks beneath, and concertina wire across the top.

“Love Is in the Air (Flower Thrower)” is another large piece presented on a section of wall, its stenciled protagonist a bandana-masked protester about to throw a yellow-and-pink bouquet of flowers in lieu of a brick or a bottle or any other typical protest projectile.

Other Banksy works in the collection are less familiar, though no less evocative of his style and the stories that fuel his art. And more murals, some of them replicated from the original installations, represent works by the likes of Diego Rivera, the French artist JR, and Judy Baca, whose signature work, “The Great Wall of Los Angeles,” is represented here too.

Floating to takeoff

The glass elevators, of course, are but one small piece of the physical setting of the museum that make it a must for anyone even mildly interested in architecture and design.

Lucas “dreamed this museum from the outside in,” Hobson said of Lucas’s original interest in creating a building and grounds that would be a kind of art themselves. “George started by aspiring to have a building so unique that 8-year-olds and 80-year-olds would equally want to come inside.”

In that, and in the building designed by Ma Yansong of the architectural firm MAD, succeeds fantastically.

The building, which is more than 700 feet long, 270 feet high and 108 feet wide, seems to hover over the grounds like a massive spaceship come to gather art from the humans of Planet Earth. Because it’s cantilevered out from its structural base, it gives off a sense of floating in place.

“We want to make architecture that makes people curious, that attracts young people, and a lot of visitors,” Yansong said at the media day. “They come here, they want to discover what’s in there. I don’t want to tell them what this is about.

“Someone says it’s a spaceship, someone says it’s a cloud, but we’re expecting people to have their own thinking and ideas.”

Deep in the architectural details provided to the media was a factoid both exhilarating and terrifying. The museum building rests on the latest seismic isolation technology, which will allow the whole thing to move up to 42 inches in any direction during a major earthquake.

Sound like fun? Just pretend you’re on board the Millennium Falcon when the hyperdrive fails while trying to escape the Imperial forces. Because Han Solo and the Lucas Museum’s seismic tech is just that good.

The landscape design is equally innovative. Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA turned acres of ugly asphalt parking lots into a vibrant, sustainable nature preserve that surrounds the museum building and covers parts of its top. That’s right, there’s an acre-and-a-half of greenspace to explore on the roof of the building.

More than 340 trees replaced those parking spaces, and the earthworks have been sculpted to evoke the flowing landforms of Los Angeles “as a plain nestled between mountains,” according to the landscaping descriptions. Public spaces included in the outdoor elements of the site include a meadow, a hanging garden, and a fountain designed to appear as a wide waterfall.

“I’m used to doing the impossible,” Lucas said at the press event. “This one almost broke my will.”

Originally planned for San Francisco, then Chicago, Hobson said she and Lucas came to believe that Los Angeles, on the edge of the University of Southern California campus where Lucas graduated from the school of cinematic arts in 1967, was where it always belonged.

“You combine [pictures and stories] and those two elements create a society,” Lucas said. “That’s why I wanted to build this. Because, you know, narrative art creates a group of people with a common belief system. And that common belief system allows them to work together, not kill each other, and do things that one person can’t do.

“There are very few things in this world, really, where you can do things all by yourself,” he said. “You really need help. You need somebody.”

Lucas and Hobson, their architects and designers, the artists and illustrators on the walls inside the Lucas Museum, all found somebody on the path to this new chapter of art in Los Angeles.

Now all you have to do is go see it.

Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

To visit, timed entry ticket prices are $25 for adults, $21 for seniors, free for kids and teens 17 and under, and free for active-duty military. Founding annual memberships start at $140, which includes admission for two people. South Los Angeles neighborhoods will also have an opportunity for free admission.