Banksy, Star Wars and JPMorgan Meet in a $1 Billion Museum

Mellody Hobson opens the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles on September 22 with her husband. The privately funded project cost roughly $1 billion.

Hobson co-chairs the museum’s board. She co-runs Ariel Investments and holds a seat on the JPMorgan Chase board, where she also serves on the risk committee.

The Wall Street Half of the Museum Sits on JPMorgan’s Board

Hobson joined the JPMorgan board in 2018. She has served as co-CEO of Ariel Investments since 2019, after serving as president from 2000. Meanwhile, the bank she helps oversee has turned into one of the loudest institutional voices in digital assets.

JPMorgan’s blockchain unit, Kinexys, has processed more than $3 trillion since its inception. It now averages over $5 billion in daily volume. This year, the bank opened its JPM Coin deposit token, JPMD, to institutional clients on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network built by Coinbase.

South Korea’s KB Kookmin Bank said in July it would start routing dollar trade payments over JPMorgan’s Kinexys network in August. As a result, the risk committee Hobson sits on covers a lender that already settles billions onchain. Strategy meanwhile ranked JPMorgan behind Fidelity in its Bitcoin banking index.

The Lucas Museum Hides a Banksy Gallery Upstairs

Lucas built the collection around storytelling rather than abstraction. Visitors will find Frida Kahlo and Norman Rockwell works beside Luke’s landspeeder and General Grievous’s wheel bike. The building holds more than 1,300 pieces and 30,000 comic books.

Curators added two walls of Banksy works to the fifth-floor murals gallery at the last minute. One carries the silhouette of a girl releasing a heart-shaped balloon. The same gallery also holds works by Diego Rivera, Judith Baca and JR.

Lucas chased sites in San Francisco and Chicago for more than a decade before Los Angeles agreed. Hobson now straddles both worlds. One holds Star Wars props, the other decides how fast big banks move tokenized money.

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