New York 42

Museums 3 min read

The Lucas Museum opens on a Tuesday, the one day of the week it is otherwise closed

Two identical amber paper circles of the same size overlapping at the centre of a dark brown ground

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens to the public on Tuesday, 22 September 2026. Tuesday is the day it closes every other week of the year.

It sits in Exposition Park in South Los Angeles: 300,000 square feet designed by Ma Yansong of MAD with Stantec, of which more than 100,000 square feet is gallery, spread across 30-plus galleries, on a 13-acre campus landscaped by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA.

What it argues

The premise is a ranking dispute. Comics, illustration, murals and cinema have never been filed alongside painting and sculpture, and this museum files them together on purpose. The inaugural hang runs to more than 1,300 works, and the names in one sentence tell you the size of the claim: Artemisia Gentileschi, Norman Rockwell, Frida Kahlo, Frank Frazetta, Robert Crumb.

Individual galleries go to N.C. Wyeth, Jessie Willcox Smith, Maxfield Parrish and Thomas Hart Benton. The mural floor holds work by Diego Rivera, JR, Judith F. Baca — whose half-mile Great Wall of Los Angeles is represented from her own archive — and pieces straight from Banksy's studio.

The room worth the airfare

The first floor holds something no other museum can offer, because no other museum went and asked. Working with the Vatican Museums, the Louvre, Spain's Altamira centre and Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, the museum made faithful reproductions of things that cannot travel: the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the winged human-headed bulls from the Palace of Sargon II, cave paintings, the Aztec Sun Stone.

One gallery, then, holds objects you would otherwise circle the planet to see. The high-resolution images and 3-D scans made along the way were given to the partner institutions to keep.

And yes, the vehicles

The cinema gallery opens with Star Wars in Motion, on the land vehicles of the first six films: concept art, props and costumes, from Luke's Landspeeder in A New Hope (1977) to the first physical build of General Grievous's wheel bike in Revenge of the Sith (2005). The Lucas Archives (1971–2012) sit behind it in full.

Two theatres — the Robert Flaherty and the Slavko Vorkapich — run as drop-in galleries rather than screenings, with films from a few minutes to ninety.

Practical

Admission is $25, $21 for over-65s, and free for anyone 17 and under, for members, and for active-duty military. Everyone needs a timed-entry ticket booked in advance, members and children included. The research library is free; the Skywalker Grill, the café, the store and the gardens need no ticket.

Open Wednesday to Monday, closed Tuesdays thereafter, late until 9pm on Friday and Saturday. Last entry is 45 minutes before closing.

The reproduction gallery is the part worth thinking about beyond the visit, because it inverts how loans normally work. A museum that wants the Sun Stone cannot have it; Mexico will not lend it, and no agreement will change that. So the Lucas Museum scanned it instead, built a copy, and handed the scan file back to the INAH — which now owns a record of its own object that it did not have to pay for. Compare that with the Bayeux Tapestry crossing to London this month under a state-level agreement after years of negotiation, for ten months, with tickets already gone. One route moves the object and rations the audience; the other moves the data and keeps the original at home. For a New Yorker deciding which trip to take, that difference is also the practical one: the Los Angeles room is not going anywhere, and the London one closes in July.

Source: Lucas Museum of Narrative Art checked against the source

More New York news

Five empty pale picture frames in pale wood hanging in a row on a dark brown wall, the one at the left tilted well off level and the other four hanging square

Museums

MoMA: what closes, what opens

At MoMA in New York, the Kahlo and Rivera show ends 12 September and the Peggy Weil on 4 October. Between 15 September and 14 November, six more open — here are all the dates in one place.

A tall red paper facade with two arched openings in gold at its base, on a warm brown ground

Museums

The Fire Museum is open again

Closed since May 2024 over the structural integrity of its 1904 firehouse, New York City's fire museum reopened on 20 August — days before 11 September 2026.

A narrow band of small interlocking paper squares in purple, orange and red across a near-black ground

Museums

Lenape Legacies opens 25 September

The Museum of the City of New York opens a show organised with the Éenda-Lŭnaapeewáhkiing Collective, with more than 30 artists — and no past tense.