The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, the $1 billion institution co-founded by filmmaker George Lucas and businesswoman Mellody Hobson, is opening September 22, 2026 in Los Angeles's Exposition Park.
That silhouette is the work of Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, who wrapped the five-story, 300,000-square-foot structure in roughly 1,500 hand-finished fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels, each one shaped to carry the building's continuous, biomorphic curve. There are no hard corners to speak of. A sweeping public canopy lifts the museum off the ground plane entirely, shading open parkland below and turning the underside of the building into one of its most dramatic spaces. Stantec serves as executive architect, and after about eight years of construction, the form that has slowly materialized beside the Coliseum is finally ready to receive visitors.
What was surface parking is becoming restored, walkable parkland designed by Studio-MLA under Mia Lehrer, knitting the museum into Exposition Park's existing campus of cultural anchors. The gardens flow up and around the building, so the landscape reads less like a setting and more like part of the architecture itself.
Inside, the museum makes its case for narrative art as a category worth a billion-dollar home. Roughly 30 thematic galleries will draw from a collection of some 40,000 works, and the range is the point: classical painting hangs in the same institution as illustration, comics, manga, photography, and film.
Details and updates at lucasmuseum.org.