George Lucas Will Curate His Own Museum

The long-delayed Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has lost its second senior member of staff in less than a year with the filmmaker appointing himself in her place.

Staff at the Los Angeles institution, which recently announced it will open on September 22 next year, were told chief curator Pilar Tompkins Rivas is leaving this week.

The LA Times reported staff were told there were "no immediate plans" to replace her and the museum's founder, Star Wars filmmaker George Lucas, would "oversee curatorial content and direction".

The $1 billion museum, set up by Lucas with his wife Mellody Hobson Lucas, has been more than a decade in the making with early plans to site it in San Francisco and then Chicago falling through.

The loss of Rivas comes nine months after director and CEO Sandra Jackson-Dumont stepped down.

The museum will draw on a collection including work by Jack Kirby, Carrie Mae Weems, Diego Rivera and Norman Rockwell as well as items from the history of comics such as a 1934 Flash Gordon strip, early Peanuts cartoons and original Black Panther pages from 1968.