We had the opportunity over the holidays to visit the newly opened Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside, California.  This is two full floors of an incredible display of Chicano art from the actor Cheech Marin’s massive collection.

This is art which is full of vibrant color and passion and full of great heart for the people.  It expresses the experience of a people who have been exploited and oppressed in the United States and from whom a tremendous richness of cultural expression and resistance has sprung forth.  The artists don’t shrink from the hard life that has young people in gangs killing each other, but rather they use their art to appeal to those gangbangers, and to all of us, to see them as human beings.  This is posed in some works as contradictions, and those works invite the viewer to think about them.

This is art of some of the finest quality you will see.  And this is art that has been hidden and suppressed and kept out of the major museums and exhibitions of this country. 

One very special part of what is currently on display only until January 22 is an exhibit titled Collidoscope by the brothers Einer and Jamex de la Torre.  They are multimedia artists working on both sides of the border using blown glass, 3-D printing and installation art.  They intersperse vivid pre-Columbian imagery with very modern depictions of the horrors of today’s world.  One of their pieces, “Exporting Democracy,” is a massive map of the world covering an entire wall and showing the U.S. pulsating with snakes while it sends out butterflies into the world, butterflies covering the ceiling which evolve into bomber-like airplanes. Another installation based on the 1969 moon landing has a backdrop of a desert-like moon surface with an Earth in flames hanging in the distance.  Peeking inside their “lunar capsule,” shaped like an Aztec god, you see figures of enslaved Black people bent to a grinding wheel which drives the operation of the capsule.

Ah, and the art, as ART!  BA has emphasized the need to be amazed, the need for awe, for beauty!  All of that is here in The Cheech!  The artists’ work brings to life the humanity and culture of the Chicano people.  But it’s also very universal, and it is so damn original!  We didn’t write down the names of many of the artists, but there were a couple of impressionist paintings that just wore out our eyes, the colors were so incredible!  And one couldn’t help but wonder, “what would Monet (the pioneer of impressionism) think of this?”

There was a painting, done very much in the style of Picasso’s Guernica (Pablo Picasso was a path-blazing Spanish artist during the 20th century, and Guernica, a Cubist interpretation of the horror and suffering caused by an actual fascist bombing of a Basque village in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, is considered one of the most important paintings in human history).  The painting in The Cheech takes Picasso’s Cubist style, transforms it to the situation of undocumented immigrants in today’s U.S., then infuses it with the style and coloring of Chicano art and imagery.  The painting defies description.

A video, which is part of the museum’s presentation, brings out, in the words of Cheech and of some of the artists featured at the museum, how the Chicano art movement came to life as a product of the protests and struggles of the 1960s and '70s, including the 1970 Chicano Moratorium.

Cheech Marin is on a mission to get this art seen and appreciated by people around the country and the world.  He has taken it on tour and now has made a permanent home for it in Riverside.  While somewhat off the beaten track for many people, experiencing this art is well worth the trip. 

If you can’t make the trip, check out an article from USA Today which includes some stunning photographs of a few of the works.