The Lucas Museum opens today. Star Wars occupies only part of its 100,000 square feet of galleries

It is not a Star Wars museum

Star Wars has a prominent place inside, including an opening exhibition devoted to the land vehicles in the first six films. Visitors can see concept designs, props and costumes tied to the saga's racers and transports, along with Luke's Landspeeder from A New Hope and the first physical build of General Grievous's Wheel Bike from Revenge of the Sith.

But the opening galleries range from detailed reproductions of prehistoric cave paintings and the Sistine Chapel ceiling to original illustration, photography, comics, manga, murals and cinema. The museum says more than 1,300 works appear in the inaugural exhibitions. Frida Kahlo, Vincent van Gogh, Beatrix Potter, Gordon Parks, Charles Schulz, Takashi Murakami and Diego Rivera are among the artists represented. The complete Lucas Archives, covering 1971 through 2012, joins that wider collection.

Thirty galleries fill a building designed without a straight line

More than 1,200 uniquely shaped panels wrap the museum's exterior. Its center rises across a 185-foot arch, leaving a sheltered public plaza beneath it and an oval opening that frames the sky four stories overhead.

Architect Ma Yansong of MAD designed the curving form with Stantec. The museum occupies 300,000 square feet in Exposition Park, with more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space across over 30 galleries.

The museum sits within a 13-acre campus that replaced an asphalt parking lot. The new landscape includes more than 300 trees, a meadow, an amphitheater, a hanging garden and ten large outdoor sculptures along accessible paths.

Some of the oldest works arrived as precise reproductions

A single museum cannot move the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Aztec Sun Stone or ancient cave paintings into Los Angeles. For its first-floor history gallery, the Lucas Museum worked with the Vatican Museums, the Louvre, Spain's Altamira museum and Mexico's national anthropology institute to create detailed reproductions.

The museum donated the high-resolution images and 3D scans used to make those replicas to its partner institutions. The result is a first-floor gallery that places original works beside reproductions of objects and sites that cannot travel.

Thirty thousand comic books sit behind the galleries

The free research library may hold the clearest map of Lucas's broader idea. Its collection includes more than 30,000 comic books, with particular depth in the Silver Age, plus books and archives on illustration, underground comics, independent publishing, photography, cinema, mythology and folklore.

About 3,000 art books donated by Steve and Ann Martin sit alongside more than 2,900 volumes from mythologist Joseph Campbell's personal library. Some of Campbell's books retain his annotations and research notes. Select holdings from the former Lucasfilm Research Library show the source material filmmakers used while constructing imaginary worlds.

The opening puts popular images on equal footing

Two theaters run film programs that visitors can enter and leave like gallery installations. Outside, sculptures place characters from Star Wars beside historical and contemporary figures.

A comic panel, a movie prop, a mural and a painting can all carry a culture's memory. That is the museum's wager, and it gives the public more than 100,000 square feet to decide whether the argument holds.