The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens its free gardens and library to visitors on September 22, giving the public access to spaces that sit apart from the paid galleries. Adults still pay $25 for the museum’s exhibition halls, while children 17 and under enter the galleries for free.
That split matters because the museum is not just unveiling a new building on an Exposition Park-adjacent campus. It is opening a set of outdoor and reading spaces meant to be used without a ticket, while the main galleries remain behind a paywall for many visitors. The museum building was designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, and the free park area was shaped by Mia Lehrer and the team at Studio-MLA.
Tracey Bates said the best part of the gardens is the way they change the feeling of a visit. “I love that if you walk into our parks and gardens, you feel different,” she said. “You do feel like you’ve been transported somewhere else, which is the joy of storytelling — which is what the museum is all about.” That idea fits a place that George Lucas has described as a “temple to the people’s art.”
The gardens make that idea visible in a way the galleries do not. Star Wars may account for only 7% of the museum’s displays, but it is hard to miss outside, where a bronze Jabba the Hutt is shown being strangled by a shackle-wielding Leia and a fountain is topped with Yoda and Grogu. Nearby are sculptures of Rosie the Riveter, Willis O’Brien and Terracotta Daughters, which places the museum’s pop-culture material alongside broader narrative art.
That mix also creates the museum’s central contradiction. The free spaces are meant to welcome anyone walking in, yet the most recognizable figures are there as visual bait, and the full museum experience still depends on paid admission for adults. Over the past six years, native flora for the gardens matured off-site, while the park itself was built where there had once been a parking lot.
What remains unclear is how much use the free gardens and library will get once monthly programming begins, and what that slate will actually look like in the park space. The museum has said the public area will host a monthly event once a month on either Friday or Saturday, but the first real test comes after September 22, when the free spaces stop being a promise and become a habit.
