With Los Angeles’s Lucas Museum of Narrative Art finally open to the press, the institution’s chief executive has responded to layoffs and high-profile departures that took place last year in the run-up to the inauguration.
In a New York Times profile of the Lucas Museum, a private museum opened at a cost of $1 billion by collectors George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, Tracey Bates, the CEO who replaced Sandra Jackson-Dumont as the institution’s leader in January, suggested that the turnover had not impacted operations.
Lucas, Bates told the Times, “has always been the chief curator.” Moreover, she said, “the planning, the mission, vision and values of this organization have never changed.”
In fact, Lucas was not always chief curator. In 2020, Pilar Tompkins Rivas was named chief curator of the museum. She departed the museum in 2025. “George Lucas has been responsible for all curatorial and content direction for the last year and will continue to work closely with the team as we move forward toward opening in September 2026,” the museum said at the time.
Tompkins Rivas was not the only high-profile staffer to leave in 2025. Jackson-Dumont left in February, a departure that the museum attributed to a “new organizational design to split the current role into two positions.” Dan Nadel, the Lucas Museum’s curator-at-large, left the institution to join the Whitney Museum in New York.
Also in 2025, the museum laid off 14 percent of its workforce; the cuts largely impacted the learning and engagement and museums services departments.
At least one notable departure preceded 2025: that of Amanda Hunt, who left her role as director of public programs in 2022 for a role at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Hunt and Tompkins Rivas were two of six hires made in 2020 to fulfill top roles at the museum; all of those hires were women of color. At the time of Tompkins Rivas’s departure in 2025, just two of those hires remained on staff.
The Lucas Museum is devoted to “narrative art,” a concept that its founders—both of whom appear on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list—have said refers to art in many mediums that can be used to relay stories. This includes Star Wars props, paintings by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, an illustration depicting Pikachu, drawings by Norman Rockwell, and recreations of cave paintings, all of which now appear at the museum, which opens to the public on September 22.
George Lucas, for his part, has suggested that bringing the Lucas Museum to fruition—a project beset by delays and controversy that has taken nearly a decade to realize—was a herculean effort. “This one almost broke my will,” the Star Wars creator said at a press conference yesterday, according to a Variety report.
