by Antonio Mejías-Rentas
This is part one of a series of two.
Cheech Marín
(After several years touring the United States with his ever-expanding collection of Chicano art, actor Richard “Cheech” Marín talks with Hispanic Link News Service entertainment editor Antonio Mejías-Rentas about his plans ‘to go international (with) these world-class painters.’ Most recently he assembled works in his collection for the exhibition Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A., at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It remains on view through Nov. 2).
Mejías-Rentas: How did you start your collection?
Marin: I’ve been a collector all my life of everything, marbles or matchbook covers, baseball cards, tennis shoes, quien sabe que I’ve had that mania since I was a kid. From a very early age I was interested in art because I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t drew a stick figure, but I loved it.
Growing up Catholic, you’re exposed to liturgical art all the time. I always loved those things on the wall. At 11 or 12, I started going to the library and taking out all the art books.
That’s how I kept up my self-education throughout my life, end I got to the point where I had some money to spend on art because I was a big shot in show business. In the mid 80s l realized the gap in my artistic knowledge was contemporary art, so l went out to galleries in the Westside of Los Angeles. That’s where I discovered the Chicano painters. The thing that really resonated with me right away was the imagery I could totally relate to. I recognized the fact that these were world-class painters, because I had been seeing good painting all my life. This was not folk art. These guys can really put it on.
Carlos Almaraz
My collection obsessive compulsion kicked in and I couldn’t stop. What ! saw was the story of a culture being told. After a white I theorized that there was a Chicano school of painting and the thing that bonded together this school was not that they painted the same way but that the experience of being Chicano was being told from a myriad of viewpoints. All these viewpoints, put together, formed en essence of the Chicano experience.
Who were the first Chicano artists you sought?
I started seeing the ones I’d heard of before, but the one that really caught my eye was Carlos Almaraz. (Almaraz died in 1989 at age 48 of AlDS-related causes.) I saw his paintings right away and thought, “This cat is deep.”
For me, Carlos Almaraz was the John Coltrane of Chicano art. He was extremely educated, very sophisticated, had traveled, been to China and Cuba and brought all these world views back and started working for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, being a sign painter.
So Chicano painting [began as] a political movement, the visual arm of the Chicano civil rights movement, and it was not classified as fine art. [We were] developing fine artists, but they were being shut out of museums, ghettoized.
In the mid 80s I was collecting heavily, living in New York while doing a movie there and hanging out with artists like Julian Schnabel or Keith Herring. I saw their art and they were living in the Hamptons, exhibiting in Basel, and Chicanos had nothing. And they were better painters. I saw an inequity and decided to use my celebrity to bring focus to them. To get them some shelf space.
How big is the collection now?
About 400 pieces, maybe 150 to 200 paintings. The others are works on paper and other media. And it’s been seen around the country.
This one show I put together, Chicano Visions, had 13 stops in five years. We broke records in every stop because of the involvement of corporate America.
Did you accomplish what you set out to do – get them shelf space?
My purpose was, 99 percent of the country does not know what a Chicano is, let alone Chicano art. I wanted to proclaim that Chicano art was mainstream art.
Now the argument is not “Is there a Chicano school of art?” but “Where does it fit? Is there a post-Chicano period?”
My view is we’re in the prenatal stage of Chicano art. We’re in the biggest wave of immigration ever in the history of this nation, chiefly from Mexico. It’s in every single state, and almost 89°/~ is under the age of 25. That’s prime baby-making years, son.
