LA’s Lucas Museum Displays “Narrative Art” for the Few, Not the People
Friction, dissonance, and multiplicity are overall avoided in favor of superficial unity and a flattening of difference at George Lucas and Mellody Hobson's new institution.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a $1 billion edifice designed by Ma Yansong/MAD Architects, is set to open its doors to the public in South Los Angeles's Exposition Park later this month. Founded by filmmaker George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson, the institution boasts a collection of 40,000 works that the couple refers to as "visual storytelling," encompassing illustrations, history paintings, comic art, films, murals, and other genres.
Constructed on an 11-acre campus featuring rolling green hills, the museum's five-story, undulating, spaceship-like structure also boasts a green roof designed by Mia Lehrer of Los Angeles's Studio-MLA. The museum's exterior, described in press materials as a "random and facile smorgasbord of art," aims to showcase the power of narrative art in bringing people together.
Despite the museum's lofty goals, the actual curation of the artworks leaves much to be desired. Spread across 100,000 square feet of gallery space, the collection is divided into 30 thematic galleries, including Adventure, Romance, Motherhood, Civic Life, Science Fiction, Comics, Sports, and others. The thematic arrangement, however, often ignores any contextual or historical background, focusing instead on superficial similarities between the works and their creators.
Some notable individuals featured in the museum include fantasy artist Frank Frazetta, American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, and Norman Rockwell. However, the artworks are displayed without any wall text or contextual information, merely adorned with shiny metal letters announcing each section. The result is a hodgepodge of seemingly unrelated art styles and eras, united only by the flimsiest of threads, seemingly attempting to unify the disparate pieces under the banner of "Narrative Art."
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