RIVERSIDE, Calif.—Riverside Art Museum (RAM) features two adjacent locations: The RAM itself, housed in a building designed by the pioneering architect Julia Morgan as the Riverside YWCA at 3425 Mission Inn Ave. at the corner of Lime St., and The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture, named for the actor and comedian Richard “Cheech” Marin, at 3581 Mission Inn at the corner of Orange St.
The recently installed life-size bronze sculpture of Cheech Marin by Ignacio Gomez poses the actor with his hands outstretched in a gesture of welcome. The statue was made possible through the generosity of the late Ofelia Valdez-Yeager, who also was the driver behind the establishment of the art museum itself. The Cheech opened in 2022 and has already become an obligatory destination on any pilgrimage to historic Chicano sites. For anyone seriously interested in the artistic contributions of Chicanos in the United States, The Cheech is simply a must.
The main exhibit we saw at The Cheech in its last weeks was the career retrospective Yolanda López: Women’s Work is Never Done, which closed in January. It featured an ingathering of work far beyond the reaches of The Cheech collection itself by the accomplished Chicana artist whose most famous work may be the immortal, ever-relevant 1978 image of an Aztec warrior staring you in the face and pointing his finger at you (à la Tío Sam of the U.S. military recruiting posters), asking, “Who’s the illegal alien, PILGRIM?”
Most of the rest on view comes from The Cheech’s collection proper. It doesn’t take long before a viewer starts appreciating that the Chicano ethos could never be entirely siloed within the community itself. Like tacos and burritos, the imagery of working-class Chicano gente became intimately and indelibly fused into the broader North American cultural palette. Major works by Frank Romero, Carlos Alcaraz, Wayne Healy, David Botello, and a host of others pop out around every corner of the museum’s space.
RAM’s Julia Morgan site is itself a work of art, and much of it has been preserved. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places and a City of Riverside Historic Landmark, the building was purchased and turned over to the Riverside Art Association on its path toward becoming the RAM. The interior courtyard is a perfect gem.
At RAM, we saw three extraordinary exhibitions. Eve Wood: Mostly Birds (and a Few Humans) explores the correlation between art and trauma, her drawings often featuring creatures that appear to be in peril. “I suppose in some way I identify with their struggles…. Jane Goodall once said we are the stewards of this planet, and in my estimation, humans are doing a deplorable job thus far—with human interference, greed, and global warming caused by man-made emissions killing off 150 species every day.” That show is on view through March 30.
A second show, Andrew K. Thompson: The Pleasure of Being Wrong. Thompson is a professional photographer whose commissioned work demands utter perfection for his clients. But, he writes in a didactic statement, “I am no longer interested in attempting to conform to photographic orthodoxies. Prevailing customs are not critical of their contradictions. If our environment is a mess, I want my images to reflect that mess, not merely a record of the mess. I want my pictures to look like my environment: scarred, broken, and rundown, not ‘good.’” He employs bleach to blur his images, hand-cuts his paper, and embroiders with thread. Thompson’s work can be viewed through March 2.
In the third show at RAM, also through March 2, Kandy G Lopez: (In)visible Threads gives us vivid portraits of her friends and neighbors in large-scale fiber works “painted” with yarn. These stunning images fascinate from any distance. From a close-up, the weaving and embroidery look abstract, but when you step back her ideas all magically—actually, no, calculatedly—fall into place.
“When I make a portrait, I ask the person to wear whatever makes them feel most confident—show off the swag! I capture their confidence and individuality. I use the color and texture of the yarn to make the figures shimmer. The colors I use make the clothing glow and pop. I work in a photorealist style, but I use yarn as paint.”
To learn about past, current, and forthcoming exhibitions at RAM, click here. I am hoping to get out again to see Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory (Feb. 10-Aug. 15) and Joel Sternfeld: On this Site (Jan. 25-July 6). I will surely visit the gift shop again—it has an extraordinary variety of high-quality items, some handmade by local artisans, at what I thought were quite reasonable prices.
One of Riverside’s great outdoor attractions is Avenida Victoria, where you can walk, drive, or bike. It runs all the way from Ivy at one end to La Sierra at the other, and block after block is planted with flowering trees, with different foliage and fruits at every season. Along the way, you can stop at three information kiosks. In addition, four different gardens featuring oranges, roses, aquatic design, and butterfly-attracting plants are catching your attention. In the year 2000, the avenue was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
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