Lucas Museum Will Erect Permanent Fences Around its Plaza, Undercutting its Rhetoric of Accessibility

An expansive public plaza surrounding Los Angeles’s recently opened Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will be permanently fenced off, reports the Los Angeles Times. The plaza around the museum, founded by filmmaker George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson, “was always meant to be a generous civic space,” the Times notes, adding that architect Ma Yansong called it “gateway” between the museum and the city.

This past weekend, the first days the museum was open to the public, fences lined with plastic greenery “blocked entry to the plaza from both sides,” per the Times. It called the fences “a shockingly makeshift solution for a museum that cost over $1 billion,” while also noting that they will be replaced by permanent ones in stainless steel. Both the museum and architect confirmed through spokespeople that “the plaza’s main entryways will remain gated off.”

Museum spokesperson Seth Fowler told the Times that the change resulted from a need to protect the pedestrian plaza from car traffic on both sides, as well as a need to control visitor flow. Unticketed visitors will be able to enter the plaza, the café, and the gift shop. MAD Architects principal Dixon Junliang Lu told the paper that the fence design had “evolved as the project developed and the operational and security requirements became more defined.”

“What could have been a grand welcome has become a gated off, highly controlled space that now feels separate from the park and the neighborhood,” the Times critiqued. “Sure, anyone can come, but they are no longer invited.”

“It is an especially peculiar contradiction,” it continues, “for a museum whose site is being leased from the state at just $30 a year and was founded to celebrate the ‘people’s art’—comics, illustrations, movie imagery—and to bring that art to the broadest possible public.”

Indeed, museum leadership has long stressed the importance of accessibility, including in a 2020 interview with ARTnews, in which then-director Sandra Jackson-Dumont said, “We want to be a people-first organization. We want to meet people wherever they are—physically, intellectually, emotionally—and we want to be inclusive in a way that connects with who people are in their daily lives and what matters to them.” (Dumont-Jackson departed in 2025.)

The museum had already abdicated the educational aspect of its mission as a museum in more ways than one, gutting the education and public programming staff in 2025 and, as ARTnews reported in a review of the museum, eschewing any didactic texts throughout the galleries: “The argument here, as confirmed by the museum, is that looking should be privileged. At an art museum, looking should indeed be prioritized, but a museum also serves another important function that the Lucas attempts to sidestep: the production of knowledge and the education of the public. A museum’s primary role, like that of the discipline of art history, is to contextualize the art on view.”