{"id":530366,"date":"2026-11-15T10:44:08","date_gmt":"2026-11-15T10:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/530366\/"},"modified":"2026-11-15T10:44:08","modified_gmt":"2026-11-15T10:44:08","slug":"at-the-alta-center-chicano-art-and-activism-walk-hand-in-hand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/530366\/","title":{"rendered":"At the Alta Center, Chicano Art and Activism Walk Hand in Hand"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the last seven months, Los Angeles has cut the ribbons on an astonishing number of high-profile museum projects: a blob-shaped building<\/a> at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art<\/a>, and this week, a 200,000-square-foot expansion at the California Science Center<\/a> that harbors the space shuttle Endeavour<\/a> in launch position.<\/p>\n

Over this same period, a free art space has been quietly taking shape on the city\u2019s fringes. When it opens to the public on Sunday, the Alta<\/a>, as it is known, will fill a void; the Los Angeles area will finally gain a major Chicano cultural center. The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture debuted to much acclaim in 2022, but The Cheech<\/a> is more than an hour away, in Riverside.<\/p>\n

Just 10 miles east of downtown, the Alta holds work from the AltaMed Health Services collection, the nation\u2019s largest corporate collection of Chicano, Latino and Mexican art. It inhabits a squat warehouse next to a Tesla dealership in Montebello (an independent city contiguous to East Los Angeles). Behind its blank facades, you\u2019ll find a pair of artist residency spaces, a visible storage room and a 3,200-square-foot gallery featuring rotating exhibitions. Currently on view is \u201cLA LA LA<\/a>,\u201d centered on the photography of Patssi Valdez<\/a>, who is perhaps best known as a co-founder of the influential art collective Asco<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Since the Alta\u2019s soft opening in May, a small stream of visitors has arrived to see the art by appointment, but otherwise it has remained under the radar. During my visit, Pilar Tompkins Rivas<\/a>, AltaMed\u2019s chief curator and vice president for art, joked that the space has had the vibe of a speakeasy.<\/p>\n

That will not be the case for much longer. Valdez, who grew up in East Los Angeles in the 1970s and \u201980s, says the center is a boon for this historically Mexican American district. \u201cWhen I was in East L.A. and Montebello, we would always head west,\u201d she said. \u201cThere wasn\u2019t anything here. So, this is a big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

The opening marks a full circle of sorts, since many of the artists whose work is held at the Alta, along with AltaMed\u2019s network of community clinics, hail from the east side of Los Angeles. The center will offer a place to examine a corner of art history that remains underexplored.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s thinking about the artists that have been important to the collection over time and how we want to showcase that,\u201d Tompkins Rivas says of the Alta\u2019s mission. \u201cThe collection here is also in service to the patient community. So, how can we develop exhibitions and programs so that it\u2019s not just about art for art\u2019s sake, but about care and compassion for the community?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWellness\u201d and \u201ccare\u201d are words that come up a lot at the Alta. The center\u2019s inaugural artists in residence, Rub\u00e9n Esparza and Felicia Montes, both explore topics related to health in their work: Esparza has created multimedia pieces around H.I.V.\/AIDS, and Montes is director of Mujeres de Maiz<\/a>, an art and wellness organization rooted in Indigenous knowledge.<\/p>\n

AltaMed is not the first health organization to steward a notable art collection. The Cleveland Clinic<\/a> has a collection of more than 7,000 works and a gallery space<\/a> that puts on temporary shows. Likewise, Cedars-Sinai<\/a>, on the west side of Los Angeles, holds more than 4,000 pieces of art, including a light installation by Robert Irwin and outdoor umbrellas designed by John Baldessari.<\/p>\n

The AltaMed collection, however, is unique in its focus on Chicano art (though many other cultures also figure in the collection). It also stands apart for the ways it connects to the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and \u201970s.<\/p>\n

The company began life as the East L.A. Free Clinic<\/a> in 1969. Founded by the Brown Berets, a Chicano group akin to the Black Panthers, its aim was to provide free health care to uninsured inhabitants of the neighborhood. Like any cash-strapped organization running largely on gumption, its first decade was bumpy. The clinic \u2014 a pair of examination rooms stocked with secondhand equipment \u2014 cycled through management teams and locations, evolving first into the El Barrio Free Clinic and, later, La Cl\u00ednica Familiar del Barrio.<\/p>\n

In 1977, C\u00e1stulo de la Rocha, a Mexican immigrant who grew up in neighboring Boyle Heights, joined the staff as an administrator. He was supposed to stay for three months but ended up spending his entire career there, helping grow that single clinic into AltaMed, the largest federally qualified health center<\/a> in California. (The company accepts federal funds to care for patients who may not have the ability to pay.) The company now operates a network of more than 60 clinics across Los Angeles and Orange County. To this day, de la Rocha serves as the organization\u2019s president.<\/p>\n

From the company\u2019s earliest days, art was part of the equation \u2014 and the collection remains infused with the spirit of the Chicano civil rights movement. This reflects de la Rocha\u2019s background, too: He was a student activist as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the late 1960s and early \u201970s, and later worked at a Latino legal aid center in the Bay Area while completing his law degree at the University of California, Berkeley. That was a time when Chicano art and activism walked hand in hand.<\/p>\n

\u201cSilk-screens were our social media,\u201d he explained during an interview a dozen miles south of the Alta at a Norwalk AltaMed, where an incandescent mural of a lake by Margaret Garcia<\/a> graces the center\u2019s community room. \u201cVietnam, farmworkers, protests \u2014 anything we organized \u2014 there were posters.\u201d As an undergraduate, he and his classmates put together \u201cEl Plan de Santa B\u00e1rbara<\/a>,\u201d a 154-page manifesto that tackled issues of representation and outlined a Chicano studies curriculum. Featured throughout the proposal was work by Chicano artists, including a cover illustration by the muralist and printmaker Malaqu\u00edas Montoya<\/a> (who is represented in AltaMed\u2019s collection<\/a>).<\/p>\n

For de la Rocha, placing art in clinics was an extension of that activist practice and a way to immerse clientele in art that had been made in and for the Latino community. \u201cI wanted to show on the clinic walls what renacimiento meant,\u201d he said, using the Spanish word for renaissance. \u201cReclaiming our history, fighting for social justice, equality \u2014 that was so real to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

AltaMed now has some 4,000 artworks in a range of formats, more than half of which will be held at the Alta. Currently on display in the visible storage room is an arresting triptych by the painter Frank Romero inspired by the turn-of-the-16th century \u201cUnicorn Tapestries<\/a>\u201d on display at the Met Cloisters in New York. Like the original, Romero\u2019s painting shows a unicorn in a corral; in his version, however, the creature is surrounded by armed men. It is titled \u201cEl Salvador\u201d and was painted during the Salvadoran civil war.<\/p>\n

The core of AltaMed\u2019s holdings are prints \u2014 the most practical form of work to display in a clinical setting. This includes suites created at local studios, such as Self Help Graphics & Art<\/a>, a Latino art space that also came to life in East Los Angeles in the 1970s, and Modern Multiples, the downtown atelier that was run by the Chicano master printer Richard Duardo<\/a> (who died in 2014). Tompkins Rivas sees it as \u201ca feedback loop,\u201d in which AltaMed helps support local artists whose work can then be seen locally within the clinics \u2014 and now the new exhibition space.<\/p>\n

The Alta is not the only artistic endeavor that AltaMed has in the works. The company recently signed a lease on a two-acre parcel in downtown Los Angeles to create a temporary art park \u2014 a move that has not been without controversy<\/a> among area residents, since it turns public land over to private use. (It will be funded by a separate nonprofit established specifically for this purpose.)<\/p>\n

For now, however, the focus remains on Montebello. The collection contains works by lesser known Mexican American artists who predate the Chicano civil rights movement, like the painter Roberto Chavez<\/a>, a mordant observer of the human condition who first emerged in the 1950s and was connected to the idiosyncratic Ceeje Gallery<\/a> on the edge of West Hollywood.<\/p>\n

The art history of that era is still being written. And the Alta, along with AltaMed\u2019s dozens of clinics, offers a distinctive place to tell the story. \u201cWe can reach 700,000 people through their annual visits to the clinics; that rivals attendance for some museums,\u201d says Tompkins Rivas. \u201cIt also becomes part of what people are experiencing in their daily lives. You\u2019re not seeking it out, but you\u2019re encountering it \u2014 in an environment where you\u2019re being cared for.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Alta<\/p>\n

1401 North Montebello Blvd., Montebello, Calif.; altamedart.org\/thealta.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the last seven months, Los Angeles has cut the ribbons on an astonishing number of high-profile museum…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":530367,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[2308,9916,119865,48,52,51,47,4384,50,49,149313,2311,16,201692],"class_list":["post-530366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-art","tag-civil-rights-and-liberties","tag-hispanic-americans","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-calif","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-mexican-americans","tag-museums","tag-race-and-ethnicity","tag-the-alta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/530367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}