One of the most fortuitous things to come out of Nash Bridges was that I was now gainfully employed and had discretionary income, which I used to start collecting Chicano art. I had been collecting this school of art since 1985 but San Francisco was where I really built the bulk of the collection.
I was self-educated in art history from a very early age. The group of cousins I described earlier had assigned me to learn about art and bring it back to the group. At age eleven, I started going to the library and checking out all the art books. In this fashion I learned about Rembrandt, Caravaggio, van Gogh, Picasso, Vermeer, and all the great giants of Western art. I kept going back to the library until there were no more books left to check out.
In addition, I started going to museums to see paintings live and up close. This was a whole different experience from seeing them reproduced in a book. Paintings must be seen in person. That is the only way you can really feel the texture of the paintings. It is the only way you can see the true colors that the artist intended. I fell in love with painting because of the lushness and luminosity and malleability of the medium. Hundreds of years later these paintings are still alive, and people can still feel the magnetism that drew people to these works of art in the first place.
The gap in my knowledge was contemporary art. I knew some names, but not many. So with my wife, Patti, who was a painter, I started going around to Westside art galleries in Los Angeles. One of the first galleries I visited was the Robert Berman Gallery where I first saw Chicano artists. I recognized right away that these artists were special.
Chicano art began in the late sixties as the public face of the Chicano Civil Rights movement. They were the sign painters, poster makers, and the backdrop artists of a political force that was demanding equal rights for the Latino population in the country. So, in the beginning, Chicano art was political art. It was not Chicano art unless it had a Sacred Heart wrapped in barbed wire or clenched fists raised in protest or the black and red United Farm Workers flag with the Union Eagle in the center. Early on, it depicted scenes of protest and conflict as they occurred in the communities.
After a while, as some goals were met and the fervor of the movement cooled down, the artists started to develop their own artistic visions. They still depicted their communities from a myriad of different viewpoints. Whether it was political, social, historical, religious or gender-based or even abstract, the art reflected the taste, or sabor, of their communities. You could now see Chicano communities from Los Angeles to El Paso and from San Francisco to San Antonio depicted in all their multicultural glory.
The Chicano School was not a particular style of painting like the Impressionists or Expressionists. Chicano artists are for the most part university and/or art school trained. They are exposed to and influenced by virtually every style, old or new or international. Chicano art is a combination of traditional Mexican art and contemporary world art. What emerges is a third thing that has its own distinctive vision. It is an evolutionary form that keeps mutating while still maintaining a Latino element. It is the first truly American school of art in almost seventy years. It is right up there with the Hudson River School, the Ashcan School, and even Pop Art. It was the inspiration for what now has evolved into street art, which is the biggest worldwide movement in art today. I knew none of this when I first started collecting. I just knew that these artists were great painters because I had seen great painting all my life.
I have been an inveterate collector of something for as long as I can remember. Whether it was baseball cards, bottle caps, or matchbook covers, I had a passion for collecting the whole set. In the beginning of my collecting mania, I was just looking for something to put over the couch. As I went on, the addiction started to take hold. Sometimes I would do movies and get partially paid in paintings.
What became apparent to me very quickly was that this was a school that was unrecognized and underserved. Because of its political beginnings, Chicano art was pigeonholed as “Agit-Prop Folk Art” (Agitational-Propaganda) and was largely shut out of museums. Who wants a bunch of headband-wearing, dope-smoking, angry Chicanos picketing their museums because they were not in the show? Undaunted, these artists kept growing and developing their own special vision. And I kept collecting them.
Eventually, the friends that I had made in the art world started urging me to show the collection. I looked around for a way to do this. After a long search, I was introduced to Stacy King from San Antonio, Texas, in 1999. Stacy had a company that was doing large, educational museum shows on a national level. Soon, she would become the head of museum projects for Clear Channel Corporation. Stacy was the perfect person, because she was a Texan from San Antonio, the other major center of Chicano art besides Los Angeles. She understood the art and the environment from which it sprang. We went around and looked for corporate sponsorship. We did our little dog-and-pony show in every major corporate boardroom across America. Finally, we connected with Target Stores and the Hewlett-Packard Corporation, who put up the production money to get the show built.
From the time we first started planning the show to the time we signed up our last museum, ten years had gone by. Target continued supporting the show through seven years and fourteen major venues across the country, including the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, the De Young in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla, the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, the Weisman in Minneapolis, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
Thanks to the corporate sponsorship of Target, the tour was hugely successful and broke attendance records in every single museum that we played. Moreover, it identified large Latino populations previously unknown to museum officials in many of the cities that hosted the show. For many people, it was the first time they had ever been in any museum.
The “Chicano Visions” tour was the first of many, many exhibitions of different parts of the collection that I would do, and still continue to do, all over the world. I would not have been able to mount and coordinate any of these shows if it were not for the invaluable work of my collections manager, assistant, and general right-hand gal, Melissa Richardson Banks from Flour Bluff, Texas.
My mantra has always been “You can’t love or hate Chicano art unless you see it.” I realized at some point that that was the reason I was collecting, to share this wonderful school of art with the rest of the world. It has become a huge part of my life and I consider myself blessed to be in this position.