It’s always a kick to visit The Cheech. The art is modern and vibrant. The experience feels like a real museum was magically transplanted to the Inland Empire. And the patrons aren’t glum art-world types with impractical haircuts.
You see couples, siblings, fathers or mothers with their children, even multigenerational groups with grandparents, children and grandchildren.
On a recent visit of mine, two twentysomething Latinas, there with their mom, all of them slightly dressy, handed me a phone and asked if I would take their photo. I was delighted to do it.
Near them was “Agárate Papa” (Hang On, Dad), an oil painting by Francisco Palomares that whimsically places a cheerful donkey piñata in a 19th century pastoral countryside.
Palomares’ piece strikes me as a joke on how Chicano art had to smuggle itself into traditional museums. That is, prior to the 2022 arrival of The Cheech, as The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside, 3581 Mission Inn Ave., is known.
An actor and comic, Marin is an avid collector of art who donated 550 works from his collection to Riverside to launch the namesake museum.
Some 80 works were part of the inaugural exhibit, “Cheech Collects.” The show was left up for one year, six months longer than anticipated, due to demand. In mid-2023, “Cheech Collects: Anniversary Edition” brought out 66 fresh pieces, with 22 holdovers.
Marin has no formal role at the museum but likes to remind everyone to relax when it comes to bringing out his collection. Mexican American art isn’t a one-shot deal. It’s there 365 days a year. At The Cheech, every month is Hispanic Heritage Month.
People are responding. The Cheech welcomed 102,000 visitors in 2023, its first full year of operation, according to Drew Oberjuerge, the museum’s executive director. (Admission, by the way, is free on Sundays through Sept. 1.)
Now there’s a third version of the “Cheech Collects” show. No, it’s not called “Cheech 3: Viva la Fiesta!” That was “Beverly Hills Chihuahua.”
“Shifting Perspectives” is the third annual exhibition at The Cheech in Riverside drawn from Cheech Marin’s collection. (Photo by David Allen, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
It’s “Shifting Perspectives: Cheech Collects.” Like the previous exhibits, it occupies almost the entirety of the main floor. It opened June 1 and runs through April 2025. You’ll find 102 works this time, 78 of which are new.
“It’s really difficult with every changeover,” says María Esther Fernández, the museum’s artistic director, with a light laugh.
Pieces that are favorites of visitors and staff can’t all stay in place. Some have to go back into storage.
Some stay put. Frank Romero’s “The Arrest of the Paleteros,” a monumental canvas depicting a SWAT team descending on ice cream vendors at Echo Park Lake, has been up since opening day.
After the first two shows presented many of the major pieces from the collection, “Shifting Perspectives” is slightly different.
“With this third one, I was really focused on changing it up a bit,” Fernández says as we talk in the galleries last Wednesday.
She continues: “We wanted people to see more of the collection, pieces you might not think would be in Cheech’s collection, because they’re not big sweeping narrative pictures that convey the Chicano experience.”
In a video accompanying the show, Marin says frankly: “I was prepared not to like it. ‘Oh, they’re taking down my favorite paintings.’ I love it. I love this show… I walked it and it works perfectly.”
Some are “process pieces.” Ricardo Ruiz’s painting of a white owl listening as five frogs dressed as mariachis sing and play guitar, “Las Mañanitas” (named for a birthday serenade), was a highlight of last year’s show. Now it’s joined by several precise pen-and-ink preliminary drawings.
Wayne Alaníz Healy’s “Pre-Game Warm-Up,” a large acrylic painting the size of a ping-pong table, is new. It’s a lively, nostalgic street scene with high school students at a walk-up burger stand. Next to it are three large studies of individual figures in pencil, as Healy worked out poses and body language.
Patrons take in “Shifting Perspectives” at The Cheech in Riverside on July 24. (Photo by David Allen, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
In another shift, some of the new art is smaller in scale.
Three of my favorites are surprisingly delicate watercolors by Wenceslao Quiroz of pickup trucks hauling materials to an Oz-like spot in the distance: the Sears tower in Boyle Heights, the Sixth Street Bridge or the Whittier Boulevard arch.
Rather than just paintings, “Shifting Perspectives” has drawings, a few sculptures and a wall of photography. The latter includes three panoramas by Chuy Benitez. One is a birthday celebration in a front yard, “Piñata Time,” which by my count has 29 people and one candy-filled pony.
Women, largely unrepresented in Marin’s donation, may be represented slightly more in this third show. I didn’t make a count, but it might be 20% by women, maybe 25%. Not parity by any means, but improving, as the collection expands and broadens.
Female artists now fill the second level, where a Judithe Hernández retrospective, which ends Sunday (Aug. 4), will be replaced by a retrospective for Yolanda Lopez starting Aug. 31.
“Shifting Perspectives” has more mixed-media work too. Candelario Aguilar Jr.’s “Las Varatas” (The Specials) remains up from last time, a giant grid of handwritten signs from a carniceria in neon-bright colors.
A new piece by Aguilar is against a facing wall. It’s a row of five matching paintings in different colors with traces of advertising. Under them, on the floor, are five plastic jugs for aguas frescas, filled instead with plastic in bright colors to match the color of the sign above, and with names like “Sandia” (Watermelon) and “Pina” (Pineapple).
“It’s a conceptual piece that challenges people’s idea of ‘what is art,’” Fernández tells me.
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For many visitors, she says, pieces like this are about “memory, cultural memory, being reflected back to them in an institution for the first time.” And if you’re not Latino, she says, it’s a place to get to know your neighbors.
That’s another reason I like The Cheech. In Southern California, Mexican culture is all around us. As those old commercials said of Palmolive, “you’re soaking in it!”
I appreciate the opportunity to soak.
David Allen escribe domingo, miércoles y viernes. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on X.
