Healthcare Firm AltaMed Opens 30,000-Sq-Ft Art Venue in Montebello

AltaMed, one of Southern California's major healthcare providers, opens a 30,000-sq.-ft gallery, library and cultural centre in the Los Angeles suburb of Montebello on Sunday 15 November. The venue, called The Alta, will house a collection the company has built over more than 50 years — some 4,000 works by artists including Laura Aguilar, Graciela Iturbide, Gabriel Orozco, Carlos Almaraz and Judy Baca.

The company began collecting in the 1970s, on the principle that art forms part of holistic well-being. About 1,400 pieces currently hang or sit in its offices and clinics. The rest have largely lived out of public view — until now.

"Our collection focuses on Chicano art," Cástulo de la Rocha, AltaMed's president, chief executive and founder of the collection, said in a statement. "Because AltaMed was founded as part of the Chicano Movement in the 1970s, because I was active in the Chicano Movement, and because our patients and employees can connect culturally with the art."

What does a healthcare company want with a museum?

The answer, according to its chief curator, is service to specific communities. "The collection is here to serve the communities that AltaMed is focused on in Los Angeles and Orange County, primarily Latino communities," Pilar Tompkins Rivas, AltaMed's chief curator and vice president of arts, told The Art Newspaper. "So we think about art that is relevant and celebratory of those populations."

AltaMed has spent recent years converting a warehouse on the edge of a Montebello shopping mall. The finished space offers regular visiting hours, open storage with works on shelves and sliding racks, and visible behind-the-scenes digitisation and conservation. Two residency studios operate on site.

The collection spans more than 100 years, though most works date from after the Second World War. Early pieces include those of Hernando Gonzallo Villa, the commercial artist who designed ads and posters for the Santa Fe Railway. More recent holdings include drawings, prints and paintings by Camille Rose Garcia, Gronk, Frank Romero, Eloy Torrez, John Valadez and Linda Vallejo.

Some commissioned works tie art directly to healthcare. Sonia Romero's mural The Fence-Pomona (2026), made for the central communal space of a senior-care facility in nearby Pomona, measures 6ft by 10ft and shows a white lattice fence with roses and the San Gabriel Mountains behind it. It overlooks a room used for meals, artmaking and gathering.

A comeback for Patssi Valdez

The opening exhibition is Patssi Valdez: LA LA LA (until 9 April 2027), featuring photo-based and collage works by a pioneer of Los Angeles's Chicano art movement. Valdez re-created photography from the 1970s and 80s — portraits of friends that helped define punk and goth glamour.

She says she discussed doing something "out of the box" with AltaMed. Several framed works have coloured strips of paper flying out from the frame, and she added Swarovski crystals to prints including Divine Dede (2026) and Hot Pink (Mario, Charlie & DeDe) (1983/2025). She also co-created pieces with two younger artists, rafa esparza and Gabriela Ruiz.

The show matters for another reason: it has been more than a decade since Valdez had a solo exhibition. "AltaMed has been a collector of my work for quite a while and has been very supportive," she says. The company has bought her paintings, photography and one of her signature full-size paper dresses, now displayed in a glass case in The Alta's open-storage area.

Down the hall, resident artist Rubén Esparza is making multimedia pieces around his "ongoing exploration of the cultural significance of Latinx, Chicano and Queer diasporas". The second studio has become an educational apothecary: Felicia Montes and her collective Mujeres de Maíz present La Botánica del Barrio (2026), with samplable herbal teas, tinctures and a decorated pushcart.

A hallway installation, The Wellness Wall, invites visitors to post cards with home remedies. Suggestions so far have ranged from "talk to friends" and "travelling" to "Vicks" and "a good mezcal".

What changes here is access. A collection built inside a healthcare company for half a century now has a permanent, walk-in home — and a test of whether clinic-rooted patronage can sustain a public cultural programme.