California funds venue for Marin’s Chicano art

LOS ANGELES — Just months after California legalized recreational marijuana, the state is giving stoner comedian Cheech Marin’s Chicano art museum $9.7 million. It must be kismet. The money was rolled up in the $139 billion California budget for 2018-19 that Gov. Jerry Brown signed June 27.

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

“The Cheech,” as Marin prefers to call it, will include about 700 paintings, drawings, sculptures and other works he has collected over 30-plus years.

Among them are works by internationally acclaimed Chicano artists such as Gilbert “Magu” Lujan, Frank Romero and Carlos The $9.7 million allocation will help Cheech Marin see his dream come true. 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 about $3 million since plans for the museum were unveiled last year. It will be located in a refurbished building next door to Riverside’s historic Mission Inn, a stopping point since it opened in the 1870s for many celebrities and presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.

Marin, a lifelong art lover, began collecting soon after he and cannabis-comedy partner Tommy Chong became famous in the 1970s. He has said through the years that 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, in the early years, so few people were aware of their work.

The level of public awareness began to change as Marin, now 71, persuaded museums nationwide to stage exhibitions. After one last year at the Riverside Art Museum drew more than double its usual attendance, officials asked him to permanently house his collection there.