The Riverside Art Museum and San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art are both expanding to feature more Chicano and Latin American works.
Cheech Marin can’t help but crack wise about his decades-old habit of acquiring art. “Unfortunately, it’s a mania,” he says. “It’s an addiction: My name is Cheech, and I’m an art collector.”
Improbable as it may sound, Marin, half of the iconic duo Cheech & Chong, who spun stoner shtick into comedy gold in the 1970s and ’80s, is widely considered the world’s preeminent collector of Chicano art. Thanks to his gift of roughly 500 pieces from this trove, the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture—or “the Cheech”—will open its doors in Riverside, Calif., in June.
Recently, museums have pledged to diversify their holdings and programming. The Riverside Art Museum’s offer to devote an entire new branch to Marin’s cache arrived at just the right time. “I had come to the point where I started to say, ‘What am I going to do with this collection?’ ” he recalls. “There’s no more room under the bed, and the garage is full. Then this thing dropped out of the sky.”
