Banksy Takes His Place in the New Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

Posted by Rosh Boroumand on 5th September, 2026
Filed under: From the Street

Banksy will feature prominently inside the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, where familiar works are presented alongside never-before-seen acquisitions obtained directly from the artist’s studio. Opening to the public on 22 September 2026, the museum places Banksy within a much longer history of murals, public art and visual storytelling.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 02: A view inside during the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Opening Preview at Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on September 02, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Lucas Museum of Narrative Art)

Founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is conceived on an extraordinary scale. Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD with Stantec, the 300,000-square-foot building contains more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space, with its inaugural exhibitions bringing together more than 1,300 works across over 30 galleries.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 02: (L-R) Mellody Hobson and George Lucas speak onstage during the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Opening Preview at Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on September 02, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Lucas Museum of Narrative Art)

For GraffitiStreet, Banksy is an obvious point of entry, but the wider institution deserves attention in its own right. This is far more than a new home for the Lucas Archives. It is an ambitious attempt to place painting, illustration, comics, photography, cinema, murals and popular visual culture within one continuous history of storytelling.

A Museum on a Monumental Scale

The architecture is integral to that ambition. Ma Yansong conceived the Lucas Museum less as a conventional museum box than as a fluid landscape within Exposition Park, its curving form designed without a single straight line. A 185-foot central arch opens beneath the building, while an elliptical oculus rises four storeys above the public plaza and more than 1,200 individually shaped exterior panels form its sweeping sculptural skin.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, designed by Ma Yansong of MAD with Stantec, brings its sweeping sculptural architecture into dialogue with the surrounding Urban landscape. Courtesy Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Photo by Hufton+Crow.

Inside, the galleries are joined by two state-of-the-art theatres, a free Research Library, ten studio and classroom spaces, a shop, café and the Skywalker Grill. Beyond the building, a new 13-acre park and gardens designed by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA replaces what was previously an asphalt parking lot with more than 300 newly planted trees, meadows, a hanging garden, amphitheatre, waterfall fountain and ten monumental outdoor sculptures.

The project brings together a significant creative and institutional team. George Lucas and Mellody Hobson co-founded the museum; Ma Yansong, founder of MAD, led its architectural vision with Stantec; and Mia Lehrer, President of Studio-MLA, shaped the surrounding landscape. The museum is led by CEO Tracey Bates, while Ryan Linkof serves as Senior Curator and Head of Film Programs. The group appeared together at the museum’s September opening preview in Los Angeles.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 02: (L-R) Mia Lehrer, President, Studio-MLA, Tracey Bates, CEO, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Mellody Hobson, George Lucas, Ma Yansong, Architect & Founder, MAD and Ryan Linkof, Senior Curator & Head of Film Programs, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art attend the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Opening Preview at Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on September 02, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Lucas Museum of Narrative Art)

Even the Research Library suggests the magnitude of the project. Its holdings include more than 30,000 comic books, approximately 3,000 art books donated by Steve Martin and Ann Martin, and more than 2,900 volumes from the personal library of mythologist Joseph Campbell, whose ideas around mythology and the hero’s journey famously influenced Lucas in the development of Star Wars.

From Van Gogh to Frida Kahlo to Banksy

The inaugural exhibitions are deliberately expansive, bringing artists and forms of visual culture together that would rarely share the same institutional narrative.

Frida Kahlo, Autorretrato dedicado al Dr. Eloesser (Self-Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser), 1940. Oil on board.© 2026 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, CDMX / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The collection stretches from Artemisia Gentileschi, Vincent van Gogh and Frida Kahlo to Norman Rockwell, Robert Crumb, Takashi Murakami and Gordon Parks, bringing canonical art history into direct conversation with illustration, comics, manga, photography and children’s literature. Rather than treating those forms as separate hierarchies, the museum places them within a broader account of how images carry stories across different generations, audiences and cultural contexts.

Cinema is treated with the same seriousness. The museum holds the complete Lucas Archives from 1971 to 2012, while the inaugural Star Wars in Motion exhibition presents concept designs, props and costumes connected with the land vehicles of the first six Star Wars films.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 02: Guests attend the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Opening Preview at Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on September 02, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Lucas Museum of Narrative Art)

That breadth makes Banksy’s presence particularly interesting. He is not being inserted as a contemporary novelty into an otherwise conventional collection. Instead, his work enters an institution deliberately questioning the boundaries between fine art, popular culture, cinema and public image-making.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, designed by Ma Yansong of MAD with Stantec, brings its sweeping sculptural architecture into dialogue with the surrounding Exposition Park landscape. Courtesy Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Photo by Hufton+Crow.

For followers of street art, however, one of its most compelling spaces is found on the fifth floor.

Banksy Inside the Lucas Museum

On the fifth floor, a gallery devoted to large-scale storytelling in public contexts considers the ways murals can carry history, identity and collective memory. Here, Banksy is positioned alongside French street artist JR, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and the extensive archive of Chicana muralist Judith F. Baca’s The Great Wall of Los Angeles.

There is a substantial Banksy installation on this floor. Familiar images including Girl with Balloon, No Ball Games, Love is in the Air and Mobile Lovers appear among wall sections, architectural fragments and a trio of Flying Copper images.

Among the most striking is Girl with Balloon, presented within a studio-built section of wall with barbed wire running across its upper edge. Elsewhere, brickwork, rough surfaces and irregular architectural forms have been deliberately constructed around the imagery, recalling the urban settings from which Banksy’s visual language emerged rather than presenting all the works as conventional framed editions.

That materiality is important because moving street art into a museum can fundamentally alter the conditions in which it is read. By recreating architectural context within the studio, Banksy retains the dialogue between stencil, surface and place, allowing the works to enter an institutional setting without reducing them to images detached from the environments that helped shape their meaning.

Most intriguing is the museum’s confirmation that the installation includes never-before-seen acquisitions obtained directly from Banksy’s studio, leaving another element of discovery for the museum’s public opening.

George Lucas and the Art of Storytelling

Best known as the legendary creator of Star Wars, George Lucas founded the museum with Mellody Hobson, the prominent businesswoman and investor who is also his wife, around a much broader belief in the cultural power of images.

Rather than separating popular visual culture from traditional art history, the Lucas Museum treats painting, murals, comics, photography, illustration and cinema as different expressions of the same human impulse to communicate through pictures.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 02: R2-D2 is seen during the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Opening Preview at Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on September 02, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Lucas Museum of Narrative Art)

Lucas describes the museum as a place created to honour “humanity’s stories and the artists who illustrate them”, arguing that the artists represented within it connect modern imagination with much older human emotions and shared beliefs.

Banksy fits naturally within that proposition. His most enduring images reduce complex social and political narratives to compositions capable of communicating almost instantaneously, whether it is a girl reaching towards a balloon, children playing beneath a No Ball Games sign or a protester preparing to throw a bouquet.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 02: Tracey Bates, CEO, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art attends the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Opening Preview at Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on September 02, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Lucas Museum of Narrative Art)

Those images have travelled far beyond the walls on which Banksy developed his visual language, circulating through photography, print and popular culture before entering increasingly significant museum collections.

For GraffitiStreet, there is something particularly satisfying about seeing street art and Star Wars brought together under one roof. Banksy’s street-born imagery now sits inside the same institution as R2-D2, the Lucas Archives and Star Wars in Motion, radically different forms of visual culture united by their extraordinary ability to turn characters, symbols and images into stories recognised around the world.

More significantly, Banksy’s position alongside JR, Diego Rivera and Judith F. Baca places his work within a much longer history of artists using walls and public space to communicate beyond traditional gallery audiences. In a museum built around the idea that images shape the stories societies tell about themselves, Banksy does not feel like an outsider being admitted into art history. He feels entirely at home within it.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens to the public in Los Angeles on 22 September 2026.

Explore Banksy at GraffitiStreet

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Follow GraffitiStreet for further coverage of Banksy and the Lucas Museum as the institution opens to the public this month.