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Chicago Lands George Lucas/Star Wars Museum
JaxUr
Posts: 547
Chicago will be the new home to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts. Who's planning on heading to the Second City?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/24/george-lucas-museum_n_5527335.html?utm_hp_ref=entertainment&ir=Entertainment
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The Lucas Museum is described as a $1 billion self-funded project that will open in 2018. It will be the "world's largest interactive museum" and dedicated to the history of storytelling. Expect lots of Joseph Campbell.
"It's my museum, I paid for it" ~ George Lucas (museum reconstruction, July, 2019)
That is my dream. The east coast has quite a bit of classic illustration but here, in California, we don’t get too much of that (which makes a whole room of J.C. Leyendecker paintings at the Haggin Museum in Stockton, CA even more amazing). For years, fine artists and galleries have turned their noses up over commercial art. And it still happens. But over the last few years/decades, that has slowly been changing. Artists like Robert Williams or Phil Hale can slip from fine art galleries to illustration to comic book work. The lines are now blurred. But, in all honesty, I’ll never ever have the money to pull creating a museum like this.
So imagine my excitement when, last year, I heard that George Lucas had a similar dream. AND, he has the money and gravitas to pull it off. I got a tour of the Lucas Ranch back in the 1990s and Lucas, along with other directors like Spielberg, like to collect those classic illustrator artists like Norman Rockwell and Dean Cornwell. So I’m sure much of that collection of his would end up in his museum for all to enjoy and it wouldn’t just be a monument to Star Wars. I was excited to hear of Lucas’ project and pimped it out on FB and even thought of driving 3-4 hours to San Francisco to one of the Presidio meetings to lobby for it.
Then San Francisco politics got involved.
The Presidio Trust are the overseers of the land vacated by the military in the 1990s. It is prime real estate. And you’ve probably seen the property values in San Francisco of late (higher than Manhattan). They’ve developed some of it with a new Disney Museum and Lucas moving ILM to there from San Rafael. One of the last plots of land was on or by Crissy Field. The Trust looked at 16 proposals and narrowed it down to 3 with Lucas’ museum as one of them. Ultimately, the Trust chose NONE of them.
They tried to throw Lucas a bone with a new location closer to the Disney Museum in the Presidio but the Trust and some citizens of SF were already ripe with gripes about the proposal. Some complaints were that, despite it being state of the art inside, the proposal called for a Beaux Arts style, and that was an outdate architecture style and didn’t match anything in the city (which is BS. Many buildings including the Legion of Honor are in a Beaux Arts style). Another complaint was that is was just a Lucas Vanity Project, which ignores that many an art museum was started by a rich patron giving back to the city and public with a museum of their own art collection and money. Alma Spreckels and the De Young family did it with a couple museums in SF and there are a few in New York as well. Today’s museum is usually started with public funds but, with today’s tight budgets, it is a tough sell. Problem solved: Lucas would put up the money.
And so, in the end, the Trust and local politics ended up pissing off Lucas. Apparently, current and former mayors tried to lobby for a new spot and to keep the museum local. After all, Lucas was a NorCal guy from Modesto and set up shop in Marin and SF. The Bay Area is a hotbed for technology and creativity and what better place should have a museum like this?
And there it went. Lucas’ wife is from Chicago and they gave him a sweet deal on the land. I had hoped for many yearly trips out to SF to enjoy this museum. My museum. The kind I’ve always wanted. I’m glad it is still being built and Chicago is a fine city but I’ll probably have to settle for a once in 20 years visit rather than every other month.
Sigh.
(Thanks for reading all that and letting me vent)