Lucas Updates Website
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has updated its website with new photos of the essentially complete Ma Yansong building and campus. Also online are hi-res images of a selection of works in the collection.
The Lucas opens Sep. 22, 2026.
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| Rendering of Library |
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| Jacob Lawrence, "The Ant and the Grasshopper," illustration for Aesop's Fables, 1969. (c) 2026 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation |
Harlem Renaissance artist Jacob Lawrence produced a set of 23 black-and-white illustrations for a 1970 edition of Aesop's Fables published by Simon & Schuster. The original, large-format (29 by 23 in.) ink drawings were previously owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and lent to a 2013 show at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University. The drawings augment lithographs and a tempera painting by the artist in the Lucas collection.
Comments
But instead of inserting contemporary works on loan and not bothering with the permanent collection, will the Lucas insert a lot of "narrative" borrowed from outside sources and ignore a lot of its own Star Wars material?
A large portion of visitors to the Lucas will be likely most interested in the owner's output from the movie franchise he made famous.
As for LACMA, I wonder how many of its visitors are more interested in contemporary art compared with works from older periods and of other formats?
Even among the closest of friends, relatives or colleagues, things can get sticky or messy.
When MOCA on Grand Ave was being planned, one of its original major supporters got into a big fight with who should or shouldn't be the architect and pulled out at the last moment. I believe a variation of the same thing occurred in the early 1960s when LACMA was being planned.
> whole encyclopedia.
After seeing the special-exhibition schedule for the past few years of the Metropolitan, I totally got why art critic Christoper Knight has been so dismissive of Govan and his management of LACMA.
Before then, I gave the museum more slack because its budget is much smaller and the Geffen is making that even worse. But then it occurred to me how the Resnick Pavilion since 2020 has had way too many displays of on-loan contemporary art. Meaning that Govan and his people have been spending even more money than they have to.
Although loans of contemporary art and temporary exhibits of it do cost way less than big-time shows, they still cost more than displays of a museum's own permanent collection.