The Cheech Celebrates Art and Starts a Second Year

Posted on by Diversions LA

Cheech Marin was there. But that’s not a surprise, given that the art celebration in mid-June was both to open three new exhibitions and commemorate a super successful first year at The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum in downtown Riverside.

Last year’s opening show was stunning, and this year offered a new bevy of treasures to mark the anniversary. And what an anniversary it is: the museum far surprassed predicted attendance by 30%, and provided a much needed home for Chicano art in Southern California.

The museum was developed as a public-private partnership between the City of Riverside, Riverside Art Museum, and Marin. As such the museum also received Marin’s prolific collection of major artworks – over 500 stellar works in all.

In helping to establish The Cheech, the Riverside Art Museum received the 2023 National Medal for Museum and Library Service, the nation’s highest honor given to museums and libraries due to the significant contribution The Cheech made to the region. Marin is justifiably proud and pleased at both the response to the museum, and the exhibitions held there. The gloriously airy, modern space is equipped with comfortable, open galleries that showcase the work, and provide the room for large scale pieces and wall art alike.

Present at the celebration – which included make your own tacos, craft brews, ceviche, and Mexican pastries for desert – Marin stated his purpose. “Riverside Art Museum’s work in the community, its educational mission, and its broad support of Chicano art is why I decided to gift my collection and work with them to create a national center.” He cited the impact the museum has had on the community, and the ways in which the museum is providing the space to show Chicano art and educate viewers about it.

As honestly enormous of a cultural success as the museum is, it’s also a bastion of innovative, beautiful, and often profound art, revealing and passionately exploring political and social issues while presenting wall art and sculptural works that not only defy expectations but go beyond them.

The anniverary introduced three new exhibitions. On the first floor, there’s a new grouping of Marin’s personally collected works in Cheech Collects, an exhibition that included a few beauties viewed last year, but a lot of new pieces as well. The art is steeped in images of Southern California and family life, as well as in the social struggles, work, community, and protest that are a part of the rich Chicano community. Curated by Maria Esther Fernandez, Marin’s collection sings with color and light, and features many works by the always impressive Frank Romero, among 40 other artists. Romero’s “City of Night” is a vision of emerald green freeways.

Throughout the collection we see images such as Carlos Almaraz’ splendid “Mystery in the Park” diptych, and Eloy Torrez’  appropriate and beautifuly rendered “It’s a Brown World After All.” These works will be on display through next May.

In the upstairs galleries, Xican-a.o.x. Body intimately explores and celebrates the ways in which Chicanx artists have placed their physical and emotional bodies within these works, establishing their presence and also indicating a necessary willingness for protest and resistance. This exhibition was created by The American Federation of Arts, and features over 125 works ranging from photography to to sculptures – the visual grabber perhaps being a hot pink low rider, Justin Favela’s “Gypsy Rose Pinata (II) is a visual confection, an enormous and vibrant sculpture.  

Narsiso Martinez’ truly stunning “Magic Harvest,” is a dimensional, sculptural painting of a migrant worker created on boxes of the produce gathered, and is wonderful from all angles, bringing the depicted worker both physically and emotionally present and fully realized.  Linda Vallejo’s heartbreaking colored pencil and photographic “23.9% of Sex Trafficking Vicimes in the US were Latino in 2010” is both sharp in color and message. These works will be on view through early January of 2024.

Last but definitely not least, there are works of emerging and local artists curated by Cosmé Cordova. Among them are Man One, Andrew J. Castillo, Carlos Beltran Arechiga, Richie Velazquez, Martin Sanchez, Denise Silva, and Jacqueline Valenzuela. This one requires you to use a bit of alacrity in visiting The Cheech – it will close October 1st. Among the many fresh and riveting works, a massive geometrically abstract work from Carlos Beltran Arechiga, “Border Field State Park,” is a particular favorite, as woven as a tapestry, as complex as memory. Arechiga also has a smaller “Self Portrait” in the mix.

Yes, the 91E is a slog from LA to Riverside, but you’ll find a true oasis of art, culture, and meaning at The Cheech, and all you Los Angelenos owe it to yourself to make a visit.

The Cheech is located at 3581 Mission Avenue in Riverside.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis

Cultural Undertow Will Pull You In

Posted on by Diversions LA

There is something quite wonderful in the Cultural Undertow, something that allows the viewer to be pulled into the waters of observation willingly, and rebaptized in them. Curated by artist Narsiso Martinez, at Luna Anais Gallery in the Tin Flats exhibition space, Cultural Undertow offers a variety of works by two exciting LA-based artists, Gloria Gem Sánchez and Tidawhitney Lek.

Working in acrylic and oil, Lek’s exquisitely rendered figurative works shape involving depictions of viscerally recognizable moments in time, each filtered through a highly feminine and feminist sensibility. In one painting, a sinewy man, looking away from the viewer, glancing back toward a sunset sky, is carrying a bright pink bucket and one very large koi in Lek’s “Between the Bucket and the Sun.”

In another, a female cat and dog, rear ends directed our way, vibrant sky and brilliant orange and yellow flowers as background, serve as a prescient double entendre in “The Pussy and the Bitch.” In another lovely work, “Encounter,” dark clouds rim an intense patch of blue, and a wall, topped by flowers, separate a woman’s face from the reaching, hands and multi-colored nails of another woman on the other side of the wall. It’s both elliptical short story and mystery – they could be a couple separated but longing to see one another, they could wish each other harm. The dark clouds and that brilliant sky – it portends many things.

Regardless of subject, Lek’s use of startlingly vivid color, floral elements, and an underpinning of longing mark her as fresh and fascinating, a highly original talent taking both the figurative and the feminist to an entirely new and heightened level.

Sanchez’s work is entirely different, and yet Martinez’ thoughtful, conversational curation binds the two artists’ works into a cohesive and immersive experience. Sanchez offers a variety of lush mediums here. Her richly blue cyanotypes are haunting, some, as in the otherworldly figure revealed in “Twin Spirit” (far left), literally seem so; others are more abstract. Her archival photographs, like Lek’s paintings, revel in original portrayals of floral elements that celebrate personal heritage.

Perhaps most involving are her mixed media works, from woven, vividly colored wall work such as the tapestry that is “Nocturne Before Dawn” to her more sculptural work, each evoking something of the mystical and ritualistic, like “Araw (Sun),” consisting of a mix of shed snakeskin, bamboo, hojas de maiz, and faux hair. There is a strong element of the spiritual, even mystical, in each of these works.

Both artists’ work arises in part from their family’s cultural roots; for Sanchez it is a Xicana-Filipina heritage and for Lek, it is Cambodian. Martinez, having celebrated his own heritage through art, including a profound sense of respect and honor revealed in paintings of Mexican farmworkers in America, is no stranger to introducing intelligent cultural references and encouraging a broadening of viewer understanding and experience through art. His attention to intimate detail and his passionate respect for often under-represented communities is fully evident in this gracious, 18-work show.

And while representing those outside the standard artistic mainstream, Cultural Undertow also serves as a galvanizing focal point for the diversity, beauty, and electrifying wonder that celebrates a variety of family backgrounds as well as an intensely feminine point of view. Perhaps most profoundly of all, the art allows us to see all of these elements as part of a beautiful, universally relatable and recognizable whole.

The exhibition is on view at Luna Anais at Tin Flats, located at 1989 Blake Avenue, Los Angeles,  through July 24th.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis