Los Angeles gains a high-profile new cultural institution after the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened with a celebrity-packed gala that signalled strong industry and political backing.
The evening’s co-host Mellody Hobson said she and George Lucas spent the run-up to the event worrying whether the city’s A-list would attend. "George kept saying, would this person come, do you think this person would come," Hobson recalled onstage in the museum lobby. She told him he need not fret, and the guest list proved her right.
Speakers framed the museum as an overdue elevation of illustration and narrative art. Queen Latifah reminded the crowd that great museums open rarely, quipping, "Met opened in 1872, I would have to be 150 years old," and casting the new museum alongside global institutions. She noted Lucas’s collection grew from a $35 Alley Oop drawing to roughly 40,000 works, many of them illustrations that the museum’s founders wanted treated as museum-quality art. Lucas echoed that view, saying, "I believe it wholeheartedly that you get to decide what art is," to applause.
The event drew an unusually wide cross-section of entertainment and industry leaders, including Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo del Toro, Spike Lee, Jon Favreau, Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill. Performers and creators such as Jon Batiste, Janelle Monáe and Pharrell Williams were present, as were studio and platform executives Josh D’Amaro, Neal Mohan, Ted Sarandos and Evan Spiegel, with Bob Iger also in attendance. Political figures on hand included Governor Gavin Newsom, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.
Architect Ma Yansong, who designed the building, corrected a common misconception onstage, saying the structure is modelled after a cloud rather than a spaceship. Speakers and hosts also acknowledged the years of pushback, legal hurdles and relocation efforts the project faced before landing in Los Angeles, with Hobson observing that "Third time is a charm." The opening marked the museum’s formal arrival after more than a decade of planning and debate, and it now begins its next phase as a public institution in the city.
