Cheech Announces Acquisitions

Danie Cansino, Narciso, 2024. The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture

The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture continues to expand its collection and geographic reach. Newly added are works by Danie Cansino (active in Los Angeles), Delilah Montoya (Albuquerque), Jimmy Peña (Corpus Christie), and Alejandro Garcia Garcia (Kansas City). A $100,000 challenge grant from the Wingate Foundation, Riverside, helped fund the purchases.

Danie Cansino's Narciso reimagines Caravaggio's Narcissus for the age of social media. The pool is a black mirror. Charlie James Gallery sold the oil-on-linen painting, which measures 48 by 72 inches.

Narciso builds on the Marin collection's focus on painting. Other acquisitions span photography, drawing, and mixed-media sculpture. Israel Alejandro Garcia Garcia's Mojado No. 1, an assemblage with neon, includes a digital counter of deaths at the US-Mexico border. 

Israel Alejandro Garcia Garcia, Mojado No. 1,  2023. Cheech Marin Center

Delilah Montoya, Casta #3 from Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra Calidad. Cheech Marin Center

Casta #3 is from Delilah Montoya's series of photographs inspired by Spanish colonial casta paintings, an Enlightenment attempt to document American race mixing for curious and alarmed Europeans. Montoya's frame includes DNA samples of her subjects.