Cheech Marin’s Personal Collection Of Chicano Art Opening To Public In Riverside, CA

Richard “Cheech” Marin–the iconic comedian and actor–had for 30 years established himself as a preeminent collector of Chicano art by the time officials from the City of Riverside, CA and the Riverside Art Museum approached him about turning his collection into a museum.

“They came up to me with a proposition and I didn’t understand it at first,” Marin recalled to Forbes.com of that initial conversation. “You want me to buy a museum? I’m doing okay, but I don’t know if I’m doing ‘museum rich.’”

All kidding aside, Riverside had a 61,420-square-foot, two-story modernist building originally used as the city’s public library it was looking to repurpose. With Marin exhibiting a fraction of his esteemed collection at the Riverside Art Museum a block away, the city put two and two together.

“No, no, we want to give you the museum for your collection; you give us the collection and we’ll house it here,” Marin remembers them explaining. “Okay…I was very dubious at first, (thinking) there’s some trick here.”

Three days later Riverside’s city manager presented Marin with a full color brochure detailing what the museum would look like with his paintings on display. Marin knew they were serious.

“It was a dream I just didn’t dare to dream because it was beyond my scope. Everybody came up to me (and said), ‘you should have your own museum;’ I should have $100 million too,” he says chuckling.

Cheech Marin now has his own museum, The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum. Thanks to a unique $14.5 million public-private partnership between the museum, the City of Riverside and Marin, “The Cheech” will open on Saturday, June 18, 2022, in downtown. The museum is dedicated to Chicana/o/x art and features roughly 500 pieces Marin has personally collected and is gifting to RAM for exhibition.

Cheech Marin: art collector

“I was raised Catholic and as a little child I’d look up at the ceiling during mass and there were pictures of guys in sheets walking around on the clouds and one guy in the corner being grilled for something. It’s intriguing this art thing,” Marin said of how he acquired the art bug. “I had a group of cousins and we were kind of bright kids and a cousin assigned us all categories to research and bring back to the group when we were like 10; I got assigned art. How do you learn about art? I went to the library and started checking out books. Every Saturday I went to the library and that’s where I started learning–that’s Cézanne, that’s Miro, that’s da Vinci.”

Boyhood curiosity led him to eventually start visiting museums. Later marrying a painter opened his eyes to how the art world connected with his background.

“She started taking me around to these contemporary galleries in Los Angeles and that’s where I first saw Chicano artists and I knew exactly what they were doing. I knew their influences because I had been studying them all my life and their background because I (had) a Mexican background myself,” Marin said. “I (wondered) how come these guys aren’t getting any galleries or in museums and nobody could answer that question, so I started collecting their art and then advocating for them.”

This was the mid-1980s. Even as a boy, however, Marin possessed the collecting gene–marbles, baseball cards, stamps. As a man, with disposable income from his successful show biz career, he would turn his attention to art. Chicano art.

“When I started running out of spaces to put (artwork) in the house–I ran out of wall space and under the bed wouldn’t fit any more art,” Marin recalls of when he knew his interest had become an obsession and he was a verified “collector.” “I started having (artwork) in storage and my friends that I started to make in the art world (said), ‘you have to show this; this does no good in the closet or under the bed.’”

And so he did. The inaugural exhibition of Marin’s collection, “Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge,” broke attendance records during its groundbreaking 15‐city tour of art museums across the United States between 2001‐2007.

Following the success of “Chicano Visions,” over a dozen additional exhibitions drawn from the Cheech Marin Collection, some 700 pieces across a variety of mediums constituting arguably the finest private collection of its kind, have toured more than 50 museums around the country and in Europe, including the Riverside Art Museum in 2017.

Chicano Art

Nearly two-thirds of the nation’s Latinos (about 37 million people) are Mexican immigrants or Mexican Americans who can trace their family ancestry south of the border. Many of these identify as Chicano, a word packed with social, cultural and political significance.

Chicano art largely grew out of El Movimiento, the counterculture Chicano Movement of the 1960s. This crusade for social justice prompted many Mexican Americans, and those who identified as Chicanos, to create art that spoke of self-determination and perseverance. The artwork focused on a spectrum of themes ranging from political representation, farmworker rights and education reforms.

Crucial to the development of Chicano art was the growing muralist movement spreading through America, a renaissance of street art also occurring in the 60s. Alongside public murals, the art emerged in silkscreen poster production. Suddenly, printed images depicting political and social issues could be seen everywhere.

“Chicano art was always political art,” Marin said in a statement introducing his museum. “And year by year, it evolved into what it is today. It can be political. It can be non-political. It can be highly personal. But what I’ve learned over the years is that Chicano art reveals the sabor (flavor) of the community.”

Whether printmaking, painting, performance art, murals, mixed media, or some combination thereof, artwork was then—and continues to be today—a key tool for Chicanos to share their unique passion and life experiences. It is a forum where creativity and activism converge.

Like Marin who was born in South Central Los Angeles, many of the artists whose work he collected have strong roots in the L.A. area.

The late Carlos Almaraz was a leading member of the Chicano Art Movement in Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s producing banners for rallies in support of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers labor union.

Patssi Valdez grew up in East Los Angeles as a multimedia artist and cofounder of the seminal Chicano artist collective called Asco along with Glugio “Gronk” Nicandro, a painter, printmaker and performance artist.

Frank Romero, one of L.A.’s most iconic artists, had work exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1974. It was acclaimed as one of the first ever Chicano art shows at a mainstream museum.

Wayne Alaniz Healy was raised in East L.A. and helped spark the muralist movement in the 1970s.

They will all have work on view at “The Cheech.”

The Cheech

“The Cheech” showcases Chicano art while honoring the impact it has on the country, the culture and the community. Each piece tells a powerful individual story and centers around a question Marin has wrestled with his whole life: What does it mean to be a Chicano?

“Being a Chicano has always meant being in the middle—being an American, but also being proud of your roots,” Marin said in a statement. “Being a Chicano means forging your own path.”

Undoubtably, with help from Marin, Chicano people and culture are more mainstream than ever before.

“It’s changed 1,000%,” Marin told Forbes.com of Chicano representation in American culture now compared to when he broke into the entertainment business in the early 70s. “Now on TV there’s not a program that doesn’t have Latinos or Chicanos; before, it was like you were an anomaly. ‘How does it feel to be the first guy that…?’ I always got those questions and now (representation is) much more widespread.”

“The Cheech” will help feed this contemporary appetite for Chicano culture which doesn’t appear to be slowing down. Opening day at the museum has long been sold out.