Cheech Marin is an occasional visitor to his namesake museum in Riverside. Visitors have bumped into him in The Cheech’s galleries and gotten autographs and photos.
Now a statue of the actor and comic at the museum will allow visitors and passersby to interact with his likeness 24/7.
“Meet Me at The Cheech,” a life-sized bronze figure, was unveiled Tuesday morning to cheers from more than 200 invited guests. The figure stands at the entry to The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, 3581 Mission Inn Ave.
Clad in a T-shirt and slightly baggy slacks, the motionless version of the antic Marin stands with a broad smile, arms stretched wide in welcome.
Cheech Marin 1.0, the flesh and blood version, was on hand to see it. We chatted before the ceremony.
“I love the pose. It’s welcoming,” Marin told me. “It’s not like a heroic pose. It’s like a grandfatherly pose, welcoming you to the house.”
(Speaking of grandfatherly, on this chilly morning Marin wore a cardigan over his T-shirt. Disappointingly, he did not hand out hard candy.)
The city-owned art museum occupies the 1960s building that was home to the public library until its renovation as The Cheech, which opened in 2021.
The museum houses Marin’s extensive collection of Chicano art as well as rotating exhibits, such as the current retrospective of Yolanda López on the second floor, and a free community gallery sponsored by Altura Credit Union.
The statue was the idea of Ofelia Valdez-Yeager, a teacher, school board member and community leader.
The Riversider helped ramrod the museum’s creation via a three-year fundraising campaign named — ha! — Reach for The Cheech. She later became president of the Riverside Art Museum, parent institution of The Cheech.
Valdez-Yeager died Jan. 7 at age 76. The statue is considered her final gift to the community.
She chose artist Ignacio Gómez to render His Cheechness. The two had previously teamed up for the Cesar Chavez statue on the downtown pedestrian mall a few blocks away.
“Ofelia was thinking about legacy and wanting to preserve Cheech’s presence here,” Drew Oberjuerge, the museum’s executive director, told me of its 78-year-old namesake.
“When people come, they say, ‘Where’s Cheech?’ They want to take a selfie with Cheech. Now,” Oberjuergue said, “they can take a selfie with Cheech 365 days a year.”
Once the $30,000 fundraising campaign met its goal, Gómez got the go-ahead to proceed. Last summer the artist took Marin into a studio for an unusual, and speedy, photo shoot.
“You walk in, it’s like a cave,” Marin said. “There were 24, 25 cameras. They’re all going off at once” — he imitated a rat-a-tat sound — and that was all that was required of him as a model.
Beats holding a pose for days as a sculptor chips away at a block of marble.
The purpose was to capture Marin from every angle to get a 3-D view, the better to produce a lifelike rendering, Gómez said. Gómez suggested the pose, modeling what he wanted, and Marin followed the cue.
“He got really into it,” Gómez said.
“It’s a very good likeness,” Marin observed. “They got my smile down, which is hard to do. My eyes tend to disappear.”
Gómez did make a few improvements. Marin remarked that the statue seems to be him a few years ago.
Marin thinks the statue will be popular. “It’ll be the Riverside version of the light poles at LACMA,” he predicted, referring to the much-photographed installation “Urban Light.”
There’s no lighting yet, which may limit night photography, but Oberjuerge said that’s in the planning.
How does Marin think people will interact with his statue?
First, he hopes nobody interacts with it by carting it off. (Not to worry: It’s embedded deeply into the concrete.)
“We’ve got to come up with some kind of thing where they touch a lucky spot, like my head,” Marin mused in our conversation. “Like the Blarney Stone. If you rub it, the luck of The Cheech will rub off on you.”
More Cheech
Among the guests Tuesday was Bobby Love. The 13-year-old from Florida had interviewed Marin by Zoom last year for his golfing column, “Fore the Love of Golf,” which is about golfing and charity, interests he shares with Marin. His column runs in a monthly magazine for the luxury set, Hampton Sheet.
Bobby donated his allowance to the Meet Me at The Cheech campaign and as a result was invited to the dedication. He and his mother, Karen, flew out to Riverside from Florida and sat at Marin’s right during the official remarks.
I was introduced to him. We met on equal ground as fellow columnists, only 47 years apart in age. Unless this 60-year-old gets to meet a keyboard pounder who’s 108, this age gap will likely remain a personal record for me.
brIEfly
Grabbing a bite Sunday afternoon at L.A.’s Grand Central Market, the food hall that dates to 1917, I noticed a man at an adjacent table, back to me, wearing a T-shirt from the Back Abbey, a gastropub with locations in Claremont and Upland and a favorite of mine. I introduced myself as a resident of Claremont. He and his companion told me they live in Rancho Cucamonga. Nice bumping into the 909 in the 213.
David Allen writes about the area in code Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on X.
