California backs Cheech’s museum

LOS ANGELES — It must be kismet. Just months after California legalized recreational marijuana, the state is giving stoner comedian Cheech Marin’s Chicano art museum $9.7 million US.

The money was rolled up in the $139 billion California budget for 2018-2019 that Gov. Jerry Brown signed this week.

The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Culture and Industry is scheduled to open in 2020 in Riverside, near Los Angeles.

The Cheech, as Marin prefers to call the museum, will include 700 paintings, drawings, sculptures and other works he has collected over more than 30 years. Among them are works by such artists as Gilbert (Magu) Lujan, Frank Romero and Carlos Almaraz.

“I have dreamed for many years of finding a home for the hundreds of pieces of art that I have spent much of my life collecting, protecting and showing, when possible, at major museums around the world,” Marin said. “The Riverside community has made this dream a reality.”

Marin and the Riverside Art Museum had already raised $3 million since plans for the museum were unveiled last year.

Marin began collecting art soon after he and cannabis comedy partner Tommy Chong became famous in the 1970s. He said he focused on Chicano art, not so much because he’s a Chicano but because of how brilliant he found the artists to be and how so few people were aware of their work.