The Cheech Marin Center Opens in Riverside, California Spotlighting Chicano Art

Cheech Marin — who gained lasting fame as half of the pioneering stoner-comedy duo Cheech & Chong starting in the ’70s before making his own way acting in film and television — thought it was kismet. He had just learned that the “beautiful midcentury building” he’d been offered to house his leading collection of art by Chicanos (an identifier for people of Mexican descent born in the U.S.) was 61,420 square feet. “Four-twenty, you say?” he recalls five years later. “Thank you, Lord! It felt like this was meant to happen.”

The “this” Marin is referring to is the new Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum — or The Cheech, for short — which is opening June 18 in the former downtown public library building of Riverside, California. It will feature paintings, photographs, sculptures and drawings from an A-list of the Chicano art movement, ranging from Frank Romero and Judithe Hernández to Gilbert “Magú” Luján and Patssi Valdez. “This school of American art is incredibly important in its longevity and its reach, from coast to coast. It’s as important as the Hudson River Valley or Ash Can or anything else. It just hasn’t had its moment of glory yet,” says Marin, who was approached about creating the center by Riverside city officials after he exhibited some of his collection at the Riverside Art Museum in 2017. Marin, who was taken by the fact that Riverside is a majority-Latino city, has so far gifted about 500 items from his more than 700-piece collection to the institution, whose new home ultimately underwent a $13.3 million retrofit, funded mainly by the state. (A $15.95 ticket provides entry to both The Cheech and the Riverside Art Museum.)

Marin, 75, an inveterate collector since childhood (baseball cards, marbles, stamps) — “that was always part of my deal” — devoted himself to collecting and promoting Chicano art after first discovering a compelling, under-the-radar group of Texas painters in the late 1980s. “I thought, ‘This is [all] the same DNA,’ ” he explains. “Some are a little more rural, some are a little more urban, but they’re cousins in the same family.”

Marin has bankrolled his collection with the help of his long run acting on TV’s Nash Bridges as well as voicing characters on Disney animated films, from The Lion King and Cars to Coco and Beverly Hills Chihuahua. The collection has been shown at more than 50 museums, including LACMA, the Smithsonian and San Francisco’s De Young — even though many arts institutions frown on exhibiting private collections, wary that the prestige of a museum show would unfairly boost potential secondary-market prices. “But my comeback was always ‘Well, I have this collection and you don’t,’ ” says Marin, contending that the same fine-art world had for decades overlooked, condescended to and marginalized Chicano artists. “There was no answer to that, because I was out there collecting when nobody was taking this seriously.”

Zach Horowitz, the former chairman and CEO of Universal Music Publishing Group who has since founded the Latino podcast company Pitaya, is a fellow collector of Chicano art who serves on the board of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach. “I’ve always been impressed by Cheech’s passion for an art form that’s had to fight for recognition,” he says. “No one has done more to champion it on a national and international level. He’s worked tirelessly over decades to make sure it’s seen and given the proper context.”

These days, with the imminent opening of The Cheech (the star suggested the eponymous christening in jesting riposte to L.A.’s blue-chip-crammed The Broad), Marin finds himself in the role of canonizing institution — with the attendant challenges. “What I’ve learned in this process is there’s nothing more expensive than a free gift,” he notes, jokingly, but also not, indicating that he experienced sticker shock when he learned he’d have to pay for an appraisal on each of his donated pieces. As a celebrity collector, he’s also found that, to his chagrin, some artists reveal an exploitative tendency to turn singular pieces he’s purchased into ex post facto series. “They do that as soon as you acquire,” he observes, tenderly. “‘Great, thanks, guys!’ “

The museum and its accompanying educational component (which is slated to include a filmmaking seminar taught by director Robert Rodriguez) intend to leverage Marin’s unrivaled collection to explore fundamental questions, including the divide between those who identify as Chicano and the (typically younger) generation who associate with the term “Latino.” “What we’re doing is weaving tales, curatorially, about the collection,” says artistic director María Esther Fernández. “We’re looking at the works together and individually, how they’re in conversation thematically, politically, artistically, conceptually, visually, art-historically.” At opening, The Cheech will highlight works from the late painter Carlos Almaraz — subject of the 2020 Netflix documentary Playing With Fire — as well as Glugio “Gronk” Nicandro, a multidisciplinary artist who was a member of the Dada-influenced East L.A. collective Asco.

Marin’s home in Pacific Palisades, which he shares with his third wife, the classical pianist Natasha Rubin, has for years been a pilgrimage stop for the top-tier art collecting likes of Steve Martin. It’s covered wall-to-wall with a rotating selection of his acquisitions.

On a weekday morning in late May, before leaving for an ADR session on the upcoming Bobby Farrelly comedy Champions that he’s starring in opposite Woody Harrelson, Marin provided The Hollywood Reporter with a tour, from dining room to upstairs bathroom and master bedroom. Between ardent meditations on brush technique and museum-caliber hanging systems, he mused on his durable entertainment career (“I’ve always existed outside the main framework of show business”) as well as his intermittent periods of artwork deaccession (“It’s called divorce”).

Then there are his multiple marijuana ventures. “You have to invent the wheel in every state,” he sighs, musing on the regulatory hassles associated with the so-called cannabis green rush. So far this year he’s debuted Muncheechos, a delivery concept involving ghost kitchens, as well as a separate weed line launched in tandem with Tommy Chong. He already had Cheech’s Stash, a curated offering of pre-rolls, proprietary strains and natural edibles. “We don’t grow,” he explains, “but you can trust ol’ Cheech here that it will always be good.”

Perhaps his favorite topic, though, at least for now, is the nuances of artwork display. Even with an amply sized building, the museum expects half a decade will pass before it cycles through the entirety of Marin’s collection. “We want people to turn every corner and there’s some knockout piece with its own [dedicated] wall,” he says, his voice rising in passion. “We’re not crowding anything. Everyone is finally getting their due.”

This story first appeared in the June 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.