Lucas Museum to Make Plaza Fences Permanent, Undercutting Accessibility Pledge

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will permanently fence off the public plaza surrounding its new Los Angeles home, the Los Angeles Times reports.

During the museum's first public opening days this past weekend, fences lined with plastic greenery "blocked entry to the plaza from both sides," according to the Times. The paper called the barriers "a shockingly makeshift solution for a museum that cost over $1 billion." Both the museum and its architect have confirmed that the temporary fences will be replaced with permanent stainless steel versions, and that "the plaza's main entryways will remain gated off."

The move sits uneasily with the institution's founding rhetoric. The museum, established by filmmaker George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson, built its plaza as an integral civic gesture: the Times notes the space "was always meant to be a generous civic space," and quotes architect Ma Yansong describing it as a "gateway" between the museum and the city. MAD Architects, Ma's firm, designed the building.

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

The Times's critique was blunt. "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 paper wrote. "Sure, anyone can come, but they are no longer invited."

The paper also flagged the economics behind the contradiction. The museum leases its site from the state of California at just $30 a year and was founded to celebrate "people's art" — comics, illustrations, movie imagery — and to bring that art to the broadest possible public.

Museum leadership has long made accessibility a centerpiece of its messaging. In a 2020 interview with ARTnews, 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." Jackson-Dumont departed the museum in 2025.

The fences are not the institution's first retreat from its public-facing mission. In 2025 the museum cut its education and public programming staff, gutting 14 percent of full-time employees. And as an ARTnews review of the museum reported, the galleries themselves contain no didactic texts of any kind.

"The argument here, as confirmed by the museum, is that looking should be privileged," the review stated. "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."

As the temporary greenery comes down and the stainless steel goes up, the Lucas Museum will face a test of whether a gated plaza can still deliver the open welcome its founders promised Los Angeles.