Lucas Museum’s Narrative Cracks: Chief Curator Exit Exposes a Leadership Void

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has lost the person meant to shape its first shows, less than a year before opening its one-billion-dollar building in Los Angeles.

Last week, chief curator and deputy director of curatorial and collections Pilar Tompkins Rivas left the institution. Staff were told there are no immediate plans to replace her; curatorial content and direction will stay under the control of founder George Lucas.

The museum, backed by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson and built on public land in Exposition Park, is due to open on 22 September 2026 after multiple delays. Its mission, as sold to the city, was simple and ambitious: a museum of “narrative art” that would serve surrounding South LA schools with extensive education programs.

Inside the project, the picture is different. In May, the Lucas Museum laid off 15 full-time and seven part-time staff, largely from learning, engagement, and visitor services, cutting deep into the very teams meant to deliver that public promise. Earlier in the year, founding director and CEO Sandra Jackson-Dumont stepped down as the institution adopted a new structure that split leadership between Lucas on content and Hollywood executive Jim Gianopulos as interim CEO.

Tompkins Rivas arrived in 2020 as part of a widely praised leadership cohort: six women in top roles, five of them women of color. With her departure, only two of those hires remain. For Los Angeles, this is not just a staffing update. Tompkins Rivas is known for long-term work with Latinx artists and communities, from the Vincent Price Art Museum in East LA to city-wide research projects and exhibitions.

Artists and curators in LA describe her exit as alarming because it follows a clear pattern: senior departures, restructuring, and cuts where public promise is supposed to live. The museum sits on public land, holds a growing collection of around 40,000 works, and has framed itself as a major civic resource on visual storytelling. The question now circulating in the city is who will actually shape those stories on the walls, and how closely that work will be tied to a single founder’s vision.

For South LA schools, artists, and educators, the timing is sharp. The building is almost finished. The opening date is fixed. The institution that was meant to arrive as a new public anchor is walking into that moment with no director, no chief curator, a reduced education staff, and an increasingly central role for its billionaire founder in day-to-day curatorial decisions.

Inside Los Angeles’s museum landscape, the Lucas project has long been framed as an experiment: can a private collection on public land deliver real civic value? Tompkins Rivas’s departure turns that experiment into a live stress test, months before the doors open and long before the first school group steps off a bus.

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