Tag: lucas museum of narrative art

Posted on

Game over for the Lucas Museum in Chicago

lucas-museum

The Lucas Museum won’t be in Chicago after all. Museum officials are ending plans to build there after a challenge from the group Friends of the Parks.

“No one benefits from continuing their seemingly unending litigation to protect a parking lot,” filmmaker George Lucas said. “The actions initiated by Friends of Parks and their recent attempts to extract concessions from the city have effectively overridden approvals received from numerous democratically elected bodies of government.”

Initial plans were to build the museum in a lakefront area that’s currently a parking lot.

Posted on

Star Wars costume exhibit going to New York City

The Force Awakens costumes, BB-8 on display at Celebration Anaheim.
The Force Awakens costumes, BB-8 on display at Celebration Anaheim.

The Smithsonian’s Star Wars traveling exhibition is heading to New York next, StarWars.com has announced. Rebel, Jedi, Princess, Queen, Star Wars and the Power of Costume, which debuted in Seattle last year, will open at Discovery Times Square in November.

They’re also adding “select costumes” and a BB-8 from The Force Awakens. We’ve previously seen a number of costumes from the new film at Celebration Anaheim and D23 Expo.

Posted on

New Star Wars costume exhibit coming to Seattle

padme-costume-cropRebel, Jedi, Princess, Queen: Star Wars and the Power of Costume will feature “60 hand-crafted costumes” from the first six films. It’s a collaboration between Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, with consultation from Lucasfilm.

Although I initially thought this would debut in D.C., another Club Jader, Nancy, noted that the exhibit is already being teased by the Experience Music Project Museum in Seattle for a January 2015 opening.

After Seattle, the exhibit will go onto 11 other cities, as yet unnamed. One will almost certainly be Chicago, when the Lucas Museum is ready.

Costumes have always been a major feature of past Star Wars exhibits, but this may be the first to focus on them exclusively. Star Wars: The Magic of Myth, which ran at the at the National Air and Space Museum from fall 1997 to early 1999, is a quite important part of Club Jade’s own history, as the reason behind our first large-scale meetup. Since then, we’ve also seen Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination, and the still-touring Star Wars Identities, which opens in France next month.

Posted on

George Lucas’ museum is heading to Chicago

George Lucas has chosen Chicago to house his art museum, the Chicago Tribune reports today. There’s only a vote from the board before it becomes 100% official – and they’ll also change the name from the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.

Lucas was originally aiming the museum for San Francisco, but turned to his part-time home of Chicago after the Presidio Trust rejected the original proposal. Chicago is the hometown of George’s wife Mellody Hobson, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel lobbied heavily. The new museum will be built on what’s now a parking lot between football stadium Soldier Field and convention center McCormick Place, and nearby many of the city’s other museums. It will likely open in 2018.