Legendary film director Martin Scorsese will moderate a panel on Sunday at New York Comic Con, which opens Thursday at the Javits Center.
The panel featuring the maestro of narrative art has been organized, fittingly, by the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, the long-gestating brainchild of ARTnews Top 200 collectors George Lucas and Mellody Hobson. The museum, originally scheduled to open in downtown Los Angeles in 2023, has seen its debut delayed multiple times. Estimated to cost $1 billion, the museum is now slated to open in 2026.
Sunday’s panel, featuring street artist JR and science fiction and fantasy painters Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, will offer attendees a preview of the new museum, including renderings, artworks, and a pre-recorded interview with Lucas and Hobson. In July, at San Diego Comic-Con—the larger of the two conventions—Lucas himself hosted a panel offering a sneak peek of the museum. Also appearing on that panel were director Guillermo del Toro, who serves on the museum’s board, and production designer Doug Chiang, a longtime Lucas collaborator. Queen Latifah served as moderator.
Rendering of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.
Courtesy Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles
It has been a tumultuous year for the museum. In February, director and CEO Sandra Jackson-Dumont stepped down; in May, the institution announced a round of staff layoffs. At the time of Jackson-Dumont’s departure, Lucas and Hobson said they would divide her role between one position focused on “content direction,” now filled by Lucas himself, and another for CEO, taken up on an interim basis by Jim Gianopulos, the former chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures. The museum has yet to announce a permanent CEO.
Once open, the museum will showcase a collection spanning all forms of visual storytelling, from painting to film to comics. Its holdings draw from Lucas’s personal art collection as well as the Separate Cinema Archive, a trove of 37,000 objects from African American film history that the museum acquired in 2019. Most prominently, in 2021, the museum purchased Robert Colescott’s 1975 painting George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook for $15.3 million at Sotheby’s New York.
The panel will begin at 11 a.m. on Sunday in Room 406.3 at the Javits Center.
