Cheech Marin posing with Cande Aguilar’s 2020 painting El Verde, acquired earlier this year. PHOTO JASMINE MARIN

What does Rembrandt’s Night Watch have to do with Chicanx art? For actor and comedian Cheech Marin, it was the inspiration for building a collection that could one day be the basis for a museum. In the 1980s, at the height of his Cheech & Chong days, Marin had started collecting Chicanx art. He visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and spent nearly an hour gazing at Rembrandt’s 14-foot-wide masterpiece—“looking at the painting and taking in every aspect of it,” he said—and it was then that he knew he wanted to build a museum-quality collection of his own.

“I’d seen it all my life growing up, in reproductions in books, but when I got there—it was a huge, huge painting, like a mural,” Marin said in an interview from his Pacific Palisades home. “When I saw it, I thought, Wow, I get it now. It made such an impression on me. I thought to myself, That’s what I have to do.”

Read the full article at ARTnews

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