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Cheech Marin's Chicano art at LACMA
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By Agustin Gurza, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Originally Published June, 14 2008 at 12:01 AM
Updated June, 14 2008 at 12:01 AM
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After more than seven years on the road, the Chicano art collection of Cheech Marin
has finally come home. Its last stop is the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, the hometown venue that initially turned down a show that
toured nationally and drew large crowds as “Chicano Visions.”
A scaled-down version, titled "Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A.,"
opens Sunday at LACMA West. It features almost 50 paintings by some of
the most influential members of the first generation of Chicano
artists, including Patssi Valdez and three of the original members of Los Four -- Frank Romero, Carlos Almaraz and Gilbert “Magu” Lujan -- the collective featured in what is considered the country's first major Chicano art exhibition, shown at LACMA in 1974.
For Marin, who championed Chicano art as his personal crusade, it's not
only a triumphal homecoming but a vindication for his campaign to place
these artists squarely in the American mainstream. "With LACMA, it's
been love-hate toward the Chicano community since the beginning," says
Marin, best known as half of the comedy team of Cheech and Chong.
"We've always been treated as the stepchildren. But I think that
attitude is turning around now. . . . They can't ignore us anymore."
The museum's attempt to acknowledge Chicano art, spotty as it has been,
predates even the earliest piece in this exhibition, Almaraz's surreal
but now familiar depiction of an accident on a freeway overpass,
"Sunset Crash" (1982). But exhibitions devoted to the field have been
few and far between. That problem was meant to be resolved by LACMA's
Latino Arts Initiative, launched in 2004. The initiative's first major
show, “Phantom Sightings,"
currently on display, marked the first time LACMA has organized its own
exhibition of contemporary Chicano art. ("Los Four" was organized by UC
Irvine.)
Marin meanwhile pursued his own parallel initiative, resulting today in
two overlapping Chicano art shows, an embarrassment of riches. "There's
almost a positive sense of disbelief that you would have two very
different Chicano art exhibitions at the same time, not just in L.A.,
but at the same museum," says Chon Noriega, head of the LACMA
initiative, a joint effort with UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center, where he's also director. "But you realize there's a lot of space in between here that we haven't even begun to cover."
Noriega considers the shows complementary. "Phantom Sightings" focuses
primarily on artists who came of age in the 1990s, some of whom don't
even consider themselves Chicano. Their work is unbound by the
constraints of ideology or canvas, and includes sculpture and
mixed-media installations. By contrast, "Los Angelenos" features
exclusively paintings, many by artists who came of age during the
Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s. They are mostly
figurative, saturated in color, depicting vivid portraits and scenes of
daily barrio life, such as Wayne Alaniz Healy’s bird's-eye perspective of "Beautiful Downtown Boyle Heights" (1993) or Margaret Garcia’s sensual "Eziquiel's Party" (2000). Magu's hand-painted 1950 Chevrolet is on display in the central patio.
To round out the show, some pieces were borrowed from LACMA's own
collection and from other private collectors, including actors Dennis
Hopper and Nicolas Cage.
Margaret Garcia’sThe newest work is by the show's youngest artist, Vincent Valdez,
who portrays a phalanx of riot police during last year's May Day
demonstrations. The menacing piece, "Nothin' to See Here, Keep on
Movin'," was so fresh it was still wet when unpacked for hanging.
One measure of the show's influence was the response of the workers who
hang the exhibitions. They've seen it all and don't usually bother to
deliver their own reviews. "They all came to me and were very vocal and
forthcoming with their enjoyment, and they're not always," says Howard
Fox, LACMA's curator of contemporary art. "There's something very
visual and retinal about the show -- it's both for the eye and for the
mind's eye."
Critics have called Marin's collection limited -- by period (too '80s),
by artists' age (too old), by size of work (too big), even by color
(too red). He says the museum rebuffed him at first, saying it would
rather not feature individual collections, but says new director
Michael Govan enthusiastically backed the show.
Marin says he just collected what he liked. "I started going to
galleries on the Westside of L.A., and that's when I discovered these
Chicano painters," he says, seated in the LACMA gallery. "I knew enough
to recognize great art, and I had the money to acquire it and the
impetus to throw my celebrity behind getting it more exposure."
For Marin, fighting for Chicano art's rightful place was not unlike
standing his ground as a child against schoolyard taunts. Richard
Anthony Marin was 10 when his family moved from South-Central Los
Angeles to the Valley suburbs of Granada Hills. One day, while waiting
to play volleyball, one of his new white classmates called out, "Hey,
Blackie, get to the back of the line."
"I just hit him as hard as I could," recalls the actor and comedian, a
second-generation Mexican American and son of a LAPD officer. "I was a
little kid, but I wasn't afraid of nobody."
Marin, 61, says he got into fights almost daily over racial slurs until
he transferred to a Catholic school and the name-calling stopped.
Instead of cracking skulls he started cracking open books, pushed by an
intellectual rivalry with his cousins back in Los Angeles. They quizzed
one another in Latin and competed to prove who was smarter.
Marin nurtured his own art appreciation by poring over art books in the
library, studying the masters of classical painting. Those boyhood
traits -- his love of art and his fighting spirit -- would serve him
well later as a champion of Chicano art.
Marin, twice married, is dating Russian pianist Natasha Rubin. He lives
in Malibu and continues to make films, appearing as the priest in the
upcoming "The Perfect Game," about the 1957 Little League team from
Monterrey, Mexico. And he continues to find thrills in art collecting,
with a recent acquisition from up and comer Shizu Saldamando.
At times, he could be the proverbial bull in the china shop. He
threatened to wage a public relations war against LACMA over what he
saw as the museum's resistance to Chicano art. Art experts across the
country, he says, rebuffed his contention that Chicanos constituted a
legitimate school of American art. After all, what does a comedian who
owns his own line of gourmet hot sauces know about fine art?
"You can argue all you want," Marin recalls responding, "but one day
I'm going to put all these paintings up in one room, and you're going
to see it."
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