This post was originally published on artnews.com
On Friday, famed film director George Lucas and businesswoman Mellody Hobson, co-founders of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, announced that director and CEO Sandra Jackson-Dumont will step down April 1.
In the joint statement, the couple, who are ARTnews Top 200 Collectors, said that Jackson-Dumont’s decision to “move on” from the role stemmed from a “new organizational design” that splits the position into two: one responsible for “content direction,” which will be filled by Lucas himself, and CEO, to be taken up on an interim basis by Jim Gianopulos, the former chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures. A search for a permanent CEO is underway, though Gianopulos will stay on as a special advisor.
“Sandra’s transformative leadership over the past five years has been essential to preparing the museum for its opening,” the founders said in the statement. “Her dedication to advancing narrative art and realizing our vision has helped lay the groundwork to establish the museum as a vital cultural resource for Los Angeles and a future destination for those who will visit from around the world. Sandra has helped create an institution that will serve and inspire generations to come.”
Jackson-Dumont’s departure comes just months after the museum quietly delayed its opening from this year to 2026. The museum has now delayed its opening three times—once in response to Covid, then again in late 2022, which Jackson-Dumont said at the time was “to make sure the building goes through the proper readiness and remediation processes,” and lastly in December.
Jackson-Dumont joined the Lucas Museum in October 2019, after five years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In July 2020, Jackson-Dumont named named six women (five being people of color) as her first key hires to senior leadership positions.
“We’re up against a long history of institutional practice and a long history of people not feeling like they can be in institutions,” Amanda Hunt, the museum’s then-director of public programs and creative practice, told ARTnews at the time. “That’s something I’ve always hoped to break open. We are building something anew; we are part of that long arc and dialogue—but how can we do that differently?”
Lucas and Hobson have not noted if the rest of museum leadership, as appointed by Jackson-Dumont, will remain, or if there are more changes afoot.
The museum, once opened, will have a collection spanning all forms of visual storytelling, from painting to film and comics. Its collection is drawn from Lucas’s personal art collection, as well as the Separate Cinema Archive, a collection of 37,000 objects from African American film history that the museum acquired in 2019. Jackson-Dumont had been growing the collection during her directorship. Most prominently, in 2021, the museum purchased Robert Colescott’s 1975 painting George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware River: Page from an American History Textbook for $15.3 million at Sotheby’s New York.
“It’s exactly what the Lucas Museum is looking at, this unbridled dismantling of high and low,” Jackson-Dumont told ARTnews after the sale. “Colescott is a great artist whose work has told so many stories.”
The museum has been in development for over a decade, with Lucas proposing sites for the museum in Chicago and San Francisco, before asking the latter and Los Angeles to submit proposals for why he should site the museum in those cities. In January 2017, Lucas announced that L.A. would be the museum’s home and appointed art historian Don Bacigalupi, formerly of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, to be its founding president. However, Bacigalupi stepped down in February 2019, saying that he would transition to a “special advisor” role focused on acquisitions; but by October, he was reportedly no longer affiliated.
As ARTnews‘ Maximiliano Duron wrote in 2020, the futuristic-looking new museum is sited “within a very specific context in Exposition Park, a neighborhood in South L.A. that is primarily Latinx and Black, and that is surrounded by other cultural institutions, as well as the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the University of Southern California.”
Jackson-Dumont could not be reached for comment at press time.