Overview: The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum is hosting the exhibition “Chicano Camera Culture: A Photographic History, 1966-2026,” which brings together 150 works by nearly 50 artists, including pioneers, innovators, and contemporary voices. The exhibition traces the evolution of photography from its activist roots in the civil rights era to the experimental, conceptual, and deeply personal work being made today. The exhibition is curated by Elizabeth Ferrer and will be on view through September 6, 2026, with a national tour to follow.
Aryana Noroozi
Riverside is home to the first major exhibition to trace six decades of Chicana/o/x lens-based practices, from 1960s movement-era photojournalism to contemporary conceptual and archive-driven work. The Cheech Museum has dedicated a major survey exhibition entirely to the photographic traditions of Chicana, Chicano, and Chicanx artists.
“Chicano Camera Culture: A Photographic History, 1966–2026” opened February 7 at The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum and runs through September 6, 2026, with a national tour to follow.
The exhibition brings together 150 works by nearly 50 artists – trailblazers, innovators, and contemporary voices – tracing photography’s evolution from its activist roots in the civil rights era to the experimental, conceptual, and deeply personal work being made today.
“This exhibition brings together generations of Chicana and Chicano photographers whose work has been central to documenting, shaping, and reimagining our communities,” said curator Elizabeth Ferrer in a statement about the exhibition. “Chicano Camera Culture not only honors the pioneers who wielded the camera as a tool for social change, but also celebrates today’s artists who are expanding the medium in bold and unexpected ways.”
Highlighting a history hidden in plain sight
The exhibition’s narrative begins in 1966, when photographers like María Varela – who joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1963 and became the first Chicana/o/x civil rights photographer – used cameras not as artistic tools, but as instruments of witness and resistance.
Other featured works include that of George Rodriguez who was on the streets of East Los Angeles photographing the 1968 student walkouts and the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, as well those of Luis C. Garza who documented the movement for “La Raza,” the influential Chicano civil rights newspaper.
Louis Carlos Bernal is widely considered the first Chicano photographer to approach the medium from the perspective of a fine artist, making intimate portraits of everyday people in barrio neighborhoods across the Southwest. His work established a visual language for Chicano identity that the decades of artists that followed would both inherit and transform.
Eight themes across six decades
Organized thematically rather than chronologically, the exhibition unfolds across eight sections: “Protests & Affirmations,” “Picturing Self and Others; Domesticana,” “Claiming Space; Border Stories; History, Remixed,” “Other Selves, Other Realities,” and “The Archive.” The structure invites visitors to trace recurring concerns such as identity, place, family and the border across various generations and mediums.
The “Border Stories” section features artists whose work confronts the US-Mexico border as both political reality and lived experience. Max Aguilera-Hellweg, once an apprentice to Annie Leibovitz, documented communities along the border before becoming a physician known for his photographs of the human body. Ada Trillo, a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, merges documentary and fine art photography to examine migration and human rights across the US-Mexico border and Central America.
“Domesticana” brings together artists who use family as both subject and medium. Kathy Vargas, known for her deeply symbolic images created through multiple exposures and hand coloring, is shown alongside Arlene Mejorado, whose work weaves family memory, migration, and archives across analogue and digital photography. Laura Aguilar – a foundational figure in Chicana/o/x art who died in 2018 – appears in the section through work that expanded the concept of community to include chosen families.
In “Border Stories; History, Remixed,” Martina Lopez, a digital photography pioneer who’s worked with nineteenth-century portrait and landscape imagery since 1985, and Robert C. Buitrón, who is recognized for photographs that satirically examine Chicana/o/x identity, illustrate how artists have used the camera to reckon with inherited and suppressed histories.
A push into conceptual territory
Among the exhibition’s most significant threads is the emergence in the 1970s and 1980s of Chicano conceptual and performance-based photography. Asco is a radical collective founded in East Los Angeles in 1972 by Harry Gamboa Jr., Glugio “Gronk” Nicandro, Patssi Valdez, and Willie Herrón III. It challenges institutional racism with “No-Movies,” street performances, and interventions including “Spray Paint LACMA”, in which they tagged the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Their legacy remains central to both Chicano and conceptual art histories.
Ken Gonzales-Day’s “Erased Lynching” and “Lynching in the West” series drew international attention as the subject of a 2026 retrospective at the USC Fisher Museum of Art. Ricardo Valverde, who photographed East Los Angeles for decades and then marked, painted, and scratched those same images into something new, appears in the exhibition as one of the medium’s most fiercely original voices.
New Voices
Younger artists in the exhibition demonstrate how the form continues to evolve. Thalía Gochez, born in Pasadena in 1994, creates highly stylized portraits of young Latinx women that blend personal narrative with contemporary fashion aesthetics; her work has appeared in Aperture, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone. Star Montana, from Boyle Heights, pairs images with text to surface grief and community history. Guadalupe Rosales, whose Instagram project @veteranas_and_rucas has grown to over 270,000 followers preserving 1990s Southern California Latinx youth culture, brings that community archival practice into gallery and institutional space.
William Camargo produces work interrogating displacement and gentrification in his hometown of Anaheim which is held by the J. Paul Getty Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, among others. Reynaldo Rivera, whose chronicles of queer and trans Latinx communities in Los Angeles since the 1980s gained widespread attention with the 2020 publication “Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City,” represent the exhibition’s commitment to showing the full breadth of Chicana/o/x experience.
“Chicano Camera Culture” is curated by Elizabeth Ferrer, author of “Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History” (2021) and a leading specialist in Latinx photography who has organized exhibitions for the Smithsonian, Aperture, El Museo del Barrio, and Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, among others.
An accompanying catalog, distributed by University of Washington Press and published by Riverside Art Museum, includes essays by Ferrer and scholars Charlene Villaseñor Black (Worcester College, University of Oxford / UCLA), Jennifer A. González (UC Santa Cruz), Deanna Ledezma (University of Illinois Chicago), Nicole F. Scalissi (CSU San Bernardino), and Mary Thomas. The 200-page hardcover, with 125 color and 50 black-and-white illustrations, is available for $50 and can be purchased at riversideartmuseum.org.
The exhibition spans both RAM locations for the first time in the museum’s history. The majority of works are featured at The Cheech through September 6, 2026, with a section at RAM’s historic Julia Morgan Building through July 5, 2026. The exhibition is supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.