Overview: “We the People: Chicano Art in the U.S.A.” is an exhibition of over 120 works by 61 artists, drawing from Cheech Marin’s personal collection, the museum’s permanent holdings, recent acquisitions, artist loans, and artwork displaced by the Pacific Palisades wildfires. The exhibition, organized by artist and curator Benito Huerta, presents a sweeping presentation of Chicano art and arrives at a charged moment in American life. The exhibition is a meditation on belonging and confronts the struggles of the Chicano community. It also shows the community in its entirety, celebrating life and experiencing joy.
Aryana Noroozi
“We the People: Chicano Art in the U.S.A” held an exclusive exhibition preview earlier this month at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside. Organized by artist and curator Benito Huerta, the exhibition presents more than 120 works by 61 artists, drawing from Cheech Marin’s renowned personal collection, the museum’s permanent holdings, recent acquisitions, artist loans, and artwork displaced by the Pacific Palisades wildfires. The result is one of the most sweeping presentations of Chicano art to date – and one that arrives at a charged moment in American life.
The show opened May 30, 2026, and runs through May 23, 2027, marking The Cheech’s fourth anniversary.
For Huerta, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Arlington and a practicing artist himself, the title is deliberate. “We the People: Chicano Art in the U.S.A. is a declarative statement that we, Chicanos, are part of the people of these United States of America,” Huerta said in a statement. “We are integral to the fabric of this country and American art.”
Ahead of the opening, Huerta traced the exhibition’s genesis to a question of scope. He was initially tasked with building something from the museum’s collection – over 500 pieces – but the project grew. The curatorial canvas expanded further when he learned that some of Marin’s personal works which were temporarily removed from his Pacific Palisades home due to smoke damage, could be incorporated. In addition, a handful of outside loans were also eventually added.
Huerta acknowledged the struggles of the fire displacement but said it provided a silver lining for public exhibition of the artwork, which may have not occurred otherwise.
The resulting curation is not only an exhibit but a meditation on belonging. Huerta said he found himself drawn to works that spoke to the current political climate for Latino and Chicano communities – some made recently, others decades ago, all of them resonate now.
“Some were done 20, 30 years ago, and this is nothing new,” he said. “It’s just been amped up and [has] become much more aggressive.”
The curatorial statement Huerta wrote for the exhibition confronts this directly. He describes a community that is perceived, at times, as criminal – rounded up, detained, deported – and asks plainly: “Who are they talking about?” Works like Frank Romero’s “The Arrest of the Paleteros” (1996), depicting ice cream vendors surrounded and arrested against the backdrop of Echo Park, feel strikingly contemporary. So does Lalo Alcaraz’s “Summer of ICE (Abandoned Paleta Cart)” (2026), newly created for this moment, alongside Arely Morales’ “Juntos – Together (2024)”, which portrays a family huddled against the elements with fear and hope in equal measure.
Yet, the exhibition is careful not to reduce Chicano life to crisis. Huerta was equally deliberate about showing the community in its entirety – people going to work, celebrating birthdays, sharing meals, laughing and experiencing joy. Wayne Alaniz Healy’s “Studies for Pre-Game Warm-Up” drawings show neighbors preparing for a day at the ballpark. Shizu Saldamando’s “Downey Happy Birthday” captures a backyard celebration, BBQ and all. Michael Alvarez’s “Aunt Helen (Delicious Spread)” offers an irreverent family picnic with a moaning stranger in the background.
“I wanted to show various aspects of life – but life today,” Huerta said.
That juxtaposition is intentional. Huerta described his curatorial method as creating conversations between works – ordinary days placed beside interrupted ones, dignity set against anxiety, so that the viewer must move between them and make meaning. “I’m trying to create a context for the work to start creating a conversation between each other,” he said. “As a result, maybe a conversation between the work and the viewer.”
When asked how he wants people to experience the show given the current political climate, Huerta stepped back from prescription. He doesn’t see his role as dictating a response. “Every person who comes to the show will bring something different,” he said. “Art can do two things: inspire and provoke. And then the third is a combination of both. You cannot dictate what the viewer is going to think and feel.”
What he is counting on is connection. The artists in “We the People” are not outsiders looking in. but neighbors, co-workers, teachers, family members. “Artists are really part of the fabric of our community and of our country,” Huerta said, “just as Chicanos are as well.”
The 61 featured artists span generations and geographies, from Carlos Almaraz, a pioneering figure who helped define the visual language of Los Angeles before his death in 1989, to younger voices like Arely Morales and Marcel Alcalá, a first-generation American artist working in Los Angeles whose practice explores queer brown identity through mixed media. Vincent Valdez’s “Hello America” (2025), a hand-colored print reimagining Washington Crossing the Delaware as a sinking boat of contemporary figures, anchors the show’s final reckoning with national mythology.
The Cheech, which opened in 2022 in Riverside’s downtown arts corridor, has built its reputation on presenting Chicano art not as a subcategory of American culture but as central to it. “We the People” is one of its most explicit arguments yet. Inland Empire audiences, which includes communities that are predominantly Latino, have lived through the political tensions that this show explores.
As Huerta framed it in his curatorial statement: “Our home is here. Our life is here. Our destiny is here, no matter what anyone says.”“We the People: Chicano Art in the U.S.A.” is on view May 30, 2026 through May 23, 2027 at The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum, 3581 Mission Inn Ave., Riverside, CA. For more information, visit thecheechcenter.org.