Entertainment

LOS ANGELES – Far out, man! Nearly 50 pieces from the collection of Cheech Marin are on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and there's not a bong, water pipe or roach clip in sight.

Reed Saxon / The Associated Press

Cheech Marin hopes to gain more recognition for Chicano art with an exhibition at the LA County Museum of Art. He stands in front of a painting titled The Arrest of the Popsicle Sellers.

Although best known as the shorter half of that enduring pothead comedy team Cheech and Chong, there is another, less public side of Mr. Marin, that of serious collector and arts patron.

Now, after years of on-again, off-again negotiations, he has succeeded in achieving a dream he carried for more than a decade: to bring the works of such pioneering artists as David Botello, Diane Gamboa and John Valadez back home to a major museum in the city where the Chicano arts movement was born some 40 years ago.

"That's been my struggle, to have these Chicanos be recognized as fine artists," says Mr. Marin as he sits in a quiet LACMA gallery on Wilshire Boulevard's "Museum Mile," admiring Margaret Garcia's impressionist work, Janine at 39, Mother of Twins.

Dressed casually in a pullover shirt, jeans and tennis shoes, he smiles graciously and offers a soft-spoken but heartfelt thank you when a museumgoer approaches to compliment the exhibition. He had to fight hard to get the show into a first-class museum, he says.

"The museum world kind of wanted to write them off as agitprop folk artists," Mr. Marin says, gesturing toward a gallery filled with works by Carlos Almaraz and Chaz Bojorquez, two of the founders of the Chicano arts movement. "These are fine artists. These are really great painters who have developed past that stage."

The exhibition "Los Angelenos, Chicano Painters of L.A.: Selections From the Cheech Marin Collection" consists of works mostly drawn from his personal collection of nearly 400 pieces. It runs until Nov. 2.

The oils, pastels, acrylics and mixed media span pretty much the entire Chicano arts period, from its beginnings when Mr. Almaraz began drawing posters for César Chávez's United Farm Workers movement to the present day.

"When Chicano art first began emerging, it was very much part of a civil-rights struggle during the late 1960s and early 1970s," says Howard Fox, LACMA's curator of contemporary art. "All of these first-generation Chicano artists were about establishing in the mind of the audience and their colleagues, as well as the art world at large and American mainstream society, that they even existed."

The actor-comedian says he came upon his role as arts patron accidentally.

Fascinated by paintings since childhood, Mr. Marin, 61, recalled going to the library to study art books at age 10 or 11. Later, he haunted museums.

"I'd get close to the paintings and have the guards yell at me. You know, 'Hey kid! Don't touch the paintings!' " he recalls with a laugh.

"But I touched them anyway," he adds conspiratorially. "I was fascinated with them."

He was collecting art nouveau and art deco in the 1980s when he discovered Chicano art.

"What immediately resonated was not just the images, which is, 'Oh, hey, this is about me and this is about my culture, about everybody I know,' " says the Mexican-American son of a Los Angeles police officer. "What resonated was I recognized them as great painters."

Great painters, he discovered, whose work was going largely unnoticed. But numerous museums, including LACMA, initially turned down his proposals for exhibitions.

"Even in the Chicano academic world, the attitude was, 'What ... is this doper going to tell us?' " Mr. Marin says of a typical reaction. " 'What's he going to have? A picture of a big joint?'"

But he persevered, launching "Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge" in 2001 with the help of several corporate sponsors. It traveled to more than a dozen cities around the United States, including St. Louis, Minneapolis and Indianapolis.

In bringing it back home, Mr. Marin decided to narrow its focus slightly, spotlighting only artists from Los Angeles.

After the show closes, he hopes to put on another that will travel to Japan, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.

"It would have been very easy for this whole generation of artists to pass by unnoticed and be rediscovered 80 years from now," he says, explaining his efforts. "But I couldn't stand around and see that being done. These guys are just too good."