Mainstream shades after choppy waters

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 (LACMA), 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 LA, runs through November 2 at LACMA West.

It features almost 50 paintings by some of the most influential members of the first generation of Chicano artists, including Gronk, 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 is not only a triumphal homecoming but a vindication for his campaign to place these artists squarely in the American mainstream.

“With LACMA, it has been love-hate towards the Chicano community since the beginning,'' says Marin, best known as half of the comedy team of Cheech and Chong.

“But I think that attitude is turning around now. ... They can't ignore us anymore.''

The museum's attempt to acknowledge Chicano art was meant to be boosted by LACMA's Latino Arts Initiative launched in 2004.

The initiative's first major show, Phantom Sightings, now on display, marked the first time LACMA has organised its own exhibition of contemporary Chicano art.

One man's campaign

Marin, meanwhile, pursued his own parallel initiative, resulting in two overlapping Chicano art shows.

“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 LA but at the same museum,'' says Chon Noriega, head of the LACMA initiative, a joint effort with the University of California and the Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Centre, where he is also director.

“But you realise there's a lot of space in between here that we haven't even begun to cover.''

Noriega considers the shows complementary. Los Angelenos features exclusively paintings, many by artists who came of age during the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

They are mostly figurative, saturated in colour, 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 handpainted 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.

“There's something very visual and retinal about the show,'' says Howard Fox, LACMA's curator of contemporary art. “It's both for the eye and for the mind's eye.''

Critics have called Marin's collection limited — by period (too 1980s), by artists' age (too old), by size of work (too big), even by colour (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 west side of LA. That's when I discovered these Chicano painters,'' he says, seated in the LACMA gallery.

“I knew enough to recognise 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 San Fernando Valley suburbs.

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. “I was a little kid but I wasn't afraid of nobody.''

Lifetime love

Marin, 61, 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 headstrong.

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.''