Sandra Jackson-Dumont will go away her function because the director and chief govt of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork in Los Angeles on the finish of March after simply over 5 years within the function. The museum, co-founded by the Star Wars film-maker George Lucas and his spouse Mellody Hobson, the co-chief govt of the asset administration agency Ariel Investments, has a price range of round $1bn and has been beneath development since March 2018. It’s at the moment anticipated to open in 2026.
Based on an announcement by the museum, Jackson-Dumont’s departure was precipitated by the adoption of a “new organisational design to separate the present function into two positions”. Chief govt duties can be taken up on an interim foundation by Jim Gianopulos, the previous chairman and chief govt of twentieth Century Fox and Paramount Photos. After a everlasting chief govt is introduced on, Gianopulos will stay as a particular advisor to Lucas and Hobson. In the meantime, Lucas himself can be “answerable for content material course” going ahead, per the announcement.
Previous to becoming a member of the Lucas Museum, Jackson-Dumont had been the chairman of schooling and public programmes on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York for 5 years. A local of San Francisco, she had beforehand held curatorial, schooling and public programming roles on the Seattle Artwork Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Whitney Museum of American Artwork.
The Lucas Museum’s improvement has had practically as many twists and turns because the Star Wars franchise itself. Initially proposed for a web site subsequent to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco—close to Lucas’s Bay Space residence base at Skywalker Ranch—the undertaking was then moved to a web site in Hobson’s hometown of Chicago close to lakefront landmarks together with the Subject Museum and Soldier Subject stadium. However following a marketing campaign by native preservationists, Hobson and Lucas in the end deserted their Chicago plan and finally settled on a parcel of land on the west aspect of Los Angeles’s Exposition Park.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork beneath development in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park © 2025 Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork, Los Angeles
The museum’s formidable, futuristic 300,000 sq. ft constructing, designed by Ma Yansong of the agency Mad Architects, is now in superior phases of development. The establishment’s assortment has additionally grown by leaps and bounds, with Hobson and Lucas buying up to date, trendy and Outdated Grasp works with a story bent, from Lucas Cranach the Elder’s The Judgment of Solomon (1526) and a Triumph of Galatea (round 1650) attributed to Artemesia Gentileschi and Onofrio Palumbo, to Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait Devoted to Dr Eloesser (1940), Norman Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barbershop (1950), Robert Colescott’s George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Web page from an American Historical past Textbook (1975) and Ernie Barnes’s The Drum Main (2003).
In 2020, Hobson and Lucas additionally acquired the Separate Cinema Archive, a trove of greater than 37,000 objects chronicling African American cinema from 1904 to the current.
