LA’s $1B Lucas Museum Lays Off 21 Employees

LOS ANGELES — The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, co-founded by Star Wars filmmaker George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson, has laid off 14% of its full-time staff — 15 employees — as well as seven part-time employees. Most of the cuts were in the Learning and Engagement and Museum Services teams, the organization said in a statement shared with Hyperallergic.

“It is a tremendously difficult decision to reorganize roles and to eliminate staff, but the restructure will allow the museum’s teams to work more efficiently to bring the museum to life for the public,” the statement read, adding that laid-off staff received severance packages and that the museum will “continue hiring new roles in strategic operational areas” in anticipation of its 2026 opening.

The Lucas Museum did not specify a reason for the cuts, unlike other institutions across the United States that have recently announced layoffs, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, all of which cited financial challenges.

Anonymous sources quoted in the Los Angeles Times, which first reported the news, described a “shocking and chaotic” scene last Thursday, May 15, when affected employees were pulled into morning meetings with Human Resources and given until 2pm to leave the premises.

Among those impacted was the museum’s curator of film programs, Bernardo Rondeau, who learned of his termination while in Cannes for the annual film festival. 

“As of today, my role as Curator, Film Programs at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has been made redundant, effective immediately,” Rondeau wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “I’m deeply grateful for the time I’ve spent there and for the many talented people I’ve had the privilege to work with.”

Another affected employee who requested anonymity told Hyperallergic that the layoffs pointed to deeper problems at the institution. “My entire time there, it was incredibly dysfunctional,” they said. “It’s very disappointing given how much opportunity there is there, both with the excellence of the staff and the resources.”

Much of that dysfunction, they said, stemmed from a “core discrepancy between what George [Lucas] thinks a museum is and what the leadership thinks it is.” 

Despite the sudden nature of the layoffs, the former employee was not surprised. “[Lucas] does not believe in museum education … I don’t know how you fire everyone who does that job a year before opening without communicating to the world that we don’t care about this,” the former worker said.

The museum is primarily funded by Lucas and Hobson, who considered possible sites in San Francisco and Chicago before settling on LA’s Exposition Park, already home to the California African American Museum, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, and the California Science Center. The site is also surrounded by more than 400 schools in a five-mile radius, as the museum noted in its recent statement, a draw for the organization given its stated commitment to public education. Hyperallergic has asked the museum whether the cuts to the Learning and Engagement teams will impact this mission.

Construction began on the $1 billion project in 2018, with pandemic-related setbacks pushing the opening date from 2023 to 2025 and eventually to 2026 as of earlier this year. Designed by Ma Yansong/MAD Architects, the five-story biomorphic structure resembles a futuristic, alien spacecraft surrounded by landscape designs, including rooftop gardens by Mia Lehrer.

The couple’s 40,000-piece collection spans the high-to-low spectrum, from works of traditional fine art by Edgar Degas, Ernie Barnes, and Norman Rockwell to comics by underground artist Robert Crumb, original “Winnie-the-Pooh” watercolors by E.H. Shepard, and sets and props from influential films, not limited to Lucas’s Star Wars franchise.

Since its founding, the museum has made several notable acquisitions, including Alice Neel’s “Fish Market” (1947); Frida Kahlo’s “Self-Portrait Dedicated to Dr Eloesser” (1940); the archives for Judy Baca’s monumental mural “The Great Wall of Los Angeles” (1976–1984); “The Triumph of Galatea” (c. 1650), a painting attributed to Artemisia Gentileschi and purchased at a 2020 Christie’s auction for $2.13 million; and Robert Colescott’s “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook” (1975), for which it paid $15.3 million at a 2021 Sotheby’s auction.

This past February, the museum announced that its inaugural director and CEO Sandra Jackson-Dumont would be stepping down after five years, and that her role would be divided between Lucas, who would oversee “content direction,” and former 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos as interim CEO. Neither Jackson-Dumont nor Rondeau responded to requests for comment.