Lucas Museum Opens in LA with Banksy, Kahlo and Star Wars

Mellody Hobson opened the $1 billion Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles on Sept. 22. The museum was privately financed and Hobson co-chairs its board. She attended the opening with her husband.

The museum’s collection centers on storytelling and contains more than 1,300 pieces and roughly 30,000 comic books. Paintings by Frida Kahlo and Norman Rockwell sit near film artifacts such as Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder and General Grievous’s wheel bike. Curators added two walls of Banksy murals late in the installation; one reproduces the artist’s silhouette of a girl releasing a heart-shaped balloon. A fifth-floor gallery also includes works by Diego Rivera, Judith Baca and the photographer-artist JR.

Hobson co-runs Ariel Investments, served as Ariel’s president from 2000 and became co-CEO in 2019. She joined the JPMorgan Chase board in 2018 and serves on the bank’s risk committee.

JPMorgan has expanded its blockchain operations in recent years. The bank’s unit, Kinexys, has processed more than $3 trillion since launch and now averages over $5 billion in daily transaction volume. JPM Coin deposit token JPMD was made available to institutional clients on Base, an Ethereum layer-2 network. South Korea’s KB Kookmin Bank began routing dollar trade payments over JPMorgan’s network in August.

Hobson’s role on the risk committee places her on the board of a lender that processes large volumes of tokenized funds on blockchain networks. The Lucas Museum pursued sites in San Francisco and Chicago for more than a decade before Los Angeles approved the location. The project’s construction and collection were financed privately at an estimated cost of about $1 billion.

The museum brings fine art, street art and film artifacts into a single public institution. The opening in September coincided with the bank’s continued rollout of institutional blockchain services.