BREAKING! Los Angeles Selected As Home Of Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, whose struggles to find a suitable home we highlighted yesterday, just announced this afternoon that they have reached a deal to come to downtown Los Angeles.

The $1.5 billion museum, funded entirely by Star Wars creator George Lucas, and dedicated to illustration, comics, film, animation, and other forms of narrative art, will be built in downtown L.A.’s Exposition Park.

Here is the official statement from the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art’s board of directors:

After extensive due diligence and deliberation, the Board of Directors of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is pleased to announce plans to build the museum in Exposition Park in Los Angeles. We have been humbled by the overwhelmingly positive support we received from both San Francisco and Los Angeles during our selection process. Settling on a location proved to be an extremely difficult decision precisely because of the desirability of both sites and cities.”

“South Los Angeles’s Promise Zone best positions the museum to have the greatest impact on the broader community, fulfilling our goal of inspiring, engaging and educating a broad and diverse visitorship,” the museum board explained further. “As a museum uniquely focused on narrative art, we look forward to becoming part of a dynamic museum community, surrounded by more than 100 elementary and high schools, one of the country’s leading universities as well as three other world-class museum. Now we turn our attention to finalizing the details and building what we believe will be one of the most imaginative and inclusive art museums in the world—a global destination that all Angelenos and Californians will be proud to call their own.”

The university to which the statement refers to is the University of Southern California, which is Lucas’s alma mater.