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| Margaret Garcia, 2nd Premonition, 2017. Courtesy of Cheech Marin |
The Cheech Marin Center reinstalled its collection galleries a year after its June 2022 opening. It says these rotations of the collection are expected to be annual.
Many of the best-known works remain on view, and Frank Romero's The Arrest of the Paleteros (1996) is still a linchpin. But there's a lot that hasn't been shown before, providing assurance that Marin's collection has a back bench. Now on display are four luminous paintings by Margaret Garcia, three of landscapes on fire.
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| Margaret Garcia, Echo Park, 2017. Gift of Cheech Marin |
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| Emmanuel Gálvez, Niño Envuelto con Frambuesa, La Mitad de Niño Envuelto y Un Niño Envuelto Completo, 2013. Gift of Cheech Marin |
Two paintings of baked goods by Emmanuel Gálvez draw on Wayne Thiebaud's equation of oil paint and buttercream icing. They demonstrate how every generation of still life artist reinvents the concept.
Speaking of food, this simulation of handpainted supermarket signage by Candelario Aguilar Jr. is more conceptual than usual for the painting-focused Marin collection.
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| Candelario Aguilar Jr., Las Varatas, 2008. Gift of Cheech Marin |
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| David Botello, Wedding Photos—Hollenbeck Park, 1990. Gift of Cheech Marin |
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| Roberto Gutiérrez, Rooftops over East L.A., 1998. Gift of Cheech Marin |
I liked a monochrome cityscape by Gutiérrez in the collection's first rotation, and this one (6 years earlier) is just as strong. It's accompanied by a stridently colorful pastel.
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| Roberto Gutiérrez, untitled (pastel), 2003. Gift of Cheech Marin |
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| Ricardo Ruiz, The Strange Serenade, 2018. Gift of Cheech Marin |
Ricardo Ruiz' The Strange Serenade finds a gender-fluid barn owl listening to a quintet of frog Mariachis. It's a merger of Latinx Surrealism and thrift-shop kitsch, the more terrifying for being uncategorizable.
Comments
That luscious picture by Emmanuel Gálvez, "Niño Envuelto con Frambuesa, La Mitad de Niño Envuelto y Un Niño Envuelto Completo," of 2013, takes the Thiebaud esthetic to an entirely extragalactic level. Yum!
Moreover, "Cheech, Part 2" reminds me of this one that featured women artists from Calif, on display already 4 years ago.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/california-women-artists-pasadena-exhibition-1464745
The amount of skill and talent out there, from A to Z, always amazes me. Screened and supervised by the gatekeepers (and trendsetters, tastemakers) of culture, politics, society.
It also reminds me of a documentary I watched a few days ago. It was about the building of the Pantheon in ancient Rome. Whoa, created even without the use of modern engineering and modern equipment. Humans do amazing things. Egypt's pyramids, anyone?
Yes, it's amazing what can be accomplished with thousands of enslaved people. Everything from building pyramids to building an American economy.
Thanks, but no thanks.
> Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t slaves who built
> the pyramids. We know this because archaeologists have
> located the remains of a purpose-built village for the
> thousands of workers who built the famous Giza
> pyramids, nearly 4,500 years ago.
> Animal bones found at the village show that the workers
> were getting the best cuts of meat. More than anything,
> there were bread jars, hundreds and thousands of them
> – enough to feed all the workers, who slept in long,
> purpose-built dormitories. Slaves would never have been
> treated this well....
> Building the pyramids was not an easy job. The
> skeletons of some of the workmen show that their muscles
> were under a large amount of strain. But they may not
> have resented their jobs too much – in graffiti left
> near the pharaoh Khufu’s burial chamber in the Great
> Pyramid of Giza, they painted the name of their work
> crew: ‘The Friends of Khufu Gang’.
Margaret Garcia