After years of construction and repeated delays, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is nearly ready to open, and it is starting with a gesture to the people who live in its shadow.
The offer
The museum will give free annual passes to residents of the 90037 ZIP code, the neighborhood that surrounds its Exposition Park home, ABC7 reported. Each pass covers the holder and one guest, and the museum framed the program as a way to make sure the neighbors who watched the building go up for years are among the first to walk through it once it opens.
How to claim it
Registration is expected to open in August through the museum's website, where residents can confirm eligibility by ZIP code and reserve their pass, ABC7 reported. The museum has also planned a Community Preview Day on September 13, ahead of the public opening, giving local residents, community partners and civic leaders a first look before the general crowds arrive.
The museum
The Lucas Museum, founded by the filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, the businesswoman Mellody Hobson, opens to the public on September 22, as the museum announced. Its striking, curved building in Exposition Park houses a vast collection devoted to narrative art and visual storytelling, spanning everything from illustration and comic art to painting, and it sits among the park's other institutions near the University of Southern California and the Coliseum.
Why it matters
Access has long been a fault line for big cultural institutions, which can feel walled off from the working-class neighborhoods around them. By handing free memberships to its closest neighbors, the Lucas Museum is trying to answer that criticism directly, treating the surrounding community not as a backdrop but as its first audience. For families in a part of Los Angeles that has not always been first in line for marquee amenities, it is a chance to claim a world-class museum as their own, starting the month it opens.
