Actor and comedian Cheech Marin, who for decades has been a noted collector of Chicano art, is teaming up with the city of Riverside and the Riverside Art Museum to create a Chicano art center.
The proposed museum, tentatively titled the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Culture and Industry, would be housed in a roughly 60,000-square-foot building now occupied by the main branch of the Riverside Public Library, which will be moving to a new structure a few blocks away.
The goal of Marin’s center — still in the earliest planning stages — would be to provide a permanent home for more than 700 works from his collection, which includes painting, sculpture and photography by Chicano artists from throughout the United States.
“It’ll be the one place worldwide that everybody can go to for all things Chicano art,” says Marin. “And it will not just be display, but it will have an academic feature so Chicano art can be seen and can be studied. There are five universities in the area.”
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