As the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture debuts, its founder hopes to inspire a renaissance in a region of California lacking public arts funding. Marin has amassed a collection of more than 700 paintings, drawings, sculptures and mixed-media works by Chicano artists, including major works by Carlos Almaraz, Frank Romero and Judithe Hernández. In art-world circles, Marin’s trove of Chicano art is believed to be the largest such collection in the world. Now, Marin’s collection has taken permanent residence at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture (known as “the Cheech”) in Riverside, Calif., a majority-Latino city of roughly 330,000 people, about 55 miles east of Los Angeles in Southern California’s vast Inland Empire region. The center, housed in the former Riverside public library, is possibly the first museum in the United States entirely devoted to showcasing Chicano art and culture. Marin hopes the project, a public-private partnership girded by significant municipal investment, will inspire a sort of Chicano art renaissance in the Inland Empire, once the cradle of California’s citrus production, and one of the nation’s fastest-growing and racially diverse regions.
