Los Angeles Gets Its Chicano Art Center: The Alta Opens in Montebello

The Alta, a free public art space housing roughly 4,000 Chicano, Latino and Mexican artworks, opens to the public this Sunday in Montebello, 10 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. It fills a gap the city has lived with for decades: until now, the closest major Chicano cultural center was The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, which opened in 2022 — in Riverside, more than an hour away.

Los Angeles has spent the last seven months cutting ribbons elsewhere: a blob-shaped building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, and a 200,000-square-foot California Science Center expansion that holds the space shuttle Endeavour in launch position. Meanwhile, the Alta took shape quietly in a squat warehouse next to a Tesla dealership. Since a soft opening in May, visitors have seen the art by appointment. Pilar Tompkins Rivas, AltaMed's chief curator and vice president for art, joked that the space has had the vibe of a speakeasy.

That ends this weekend.

What will visitors find?

The Alta draws on the AltaMed Health Services collection, the nation's largest corporate collection of Chicano, Latino and Mexican art. Behind its blank facades sit two artist residency spaces, a visible storage room and a 3,200-square-foot gallery for rotating exhibitions. The inaugural show, "LA LA LA," centers on the photography of Patssi Valdez, co-founder of the influential collective Asco (a conceptual art group active in 1970s Los Angeles).

More than half of AltaMed's holdings will live at the site. On view in the visible storage room is a triptych by painter Frank Romero, inspired by the turn-of-the-16th-century "Unicorn Tapestries" at the Met Cloisters. In Romero's version, the corralled unicorn is surrounded by armed men. The painting is titled "El Salvador" and dates from the Salvadoran civil war.

The collection's core is prints — the most practical medium for clinic walls. Suites were made at local studios such as Self Help Graphics & Art, the Latino art space born in East Los Angeles in the 1970s, and Modern Multiples, the downtown atelier run by Chicano master printer Richard Duardo, who died in 2014. Tompkins Rivas calls it "a feedback loop," in which AltaMed supports local artists whose work is then seen locally.

The holdings also reach earlier than the Chicano movement, including painters like Roberto Chavez, a mordant observer of the human condition who emerged in the 1950s and showed at the idiosyncratic Ceeje Gallery on the edge of West Hollywood.

Why does a health company run an art collection?

AltaMed began as the East L.A. Free Clinic in 1969, founded by the Brown Berets, a Chicano group akin to the Black Panthers, to provide free care to uninsured neighbors. The clinic — two examination rooms stocked with secondhand equipment — cycled through management teams, becoming El Barrio Free Clinic and then La Clínica Familiar del Barrio.

In 1977, Cástulo de la Rocha, a Mexican immigrant raised in Boyle Heights, joined as an administrator, planning to stay three months. He stayed his entire career, growing one clinic into AltaMed, California's largest federally qualified health center (an organization receiving federal funds to treat patients regardless of ability to pay). It now runs more than 60 clinics across Los Angeles and Orange County. De la Rocha remains president.

Art was part of the equation from the start. De la Rocha had been a student activist at UC Santa Barbara in the late 1960s, and helped assemble "El Plan de Santa Bárbara," a 154-page Chicano studies manifesto illustrated by Chicano artists, with a cover by muralist and printmaker Malaquías Montoya — who is represented in AltaMed's collection.

"Silk-screens were our social media," de la Rocha said in an interview at a Norwalk AltaMed clinic, where a mural of a lake by Margaret Garcia graces the community room. "Vietnam, farmworkers, protests — anything we organized — there were posters."

"I wanted to show on the clinic walls what renacimiento meant," he added, using the Spanish word for renaissance. "Reclaiming our history, fighting for social justice, equality — that was so real to me."

Tompkins Rivas frames the mission similarly. "It's thinking about the artists that have been important to the collection over time and how we want to showcase that," she said. "The collection here is also in service to the patient community. So, how can we develop exhibitions and programs so that it's not just about art for art's sake, but about care and compassion for the community?"

The inaugural artists in residence fit the brief. Rubén Esparza has made multimedia work around H.I.V./AIDS; Felicia Montes directs Mujeres de Maiz, an art and wellness organization rooted in Indigenous knowledge.

How does the Alta compare?

Health organizations with serious art programs exist. The Cleveland Clinic holds more than 7,000 works and mounts temporary shows. Cedars-Sinai, on LA's west side, holds more than 4,000 pieces, including a light installation by Robert Irwin and outdoor umbrellas by John Baldessari. AltaMed's collection stands apart for its Chicano focus and its roots in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s.

For Valdez, who grew up in East Los Angeles in the 1970s and '80s, the center corrects a long imbalance. "When I was in East L.A. and Montebello, we would always head west," she said. "There wasn't anything here. So, this is a big deal."

AltaMed isn't done. It recently signed a lease on a two-acre downtown parcel for a temporary art park, funded by a separate nonprofit — a move that has drawn controversy among residents for turning public land over to private use.

The larger prize may be the clinics themselves. "We can reach 700,000 people through their annual visits to the clinics; that rivals attendance for some museums," Tompkins Rivas said. "It also becomes part of what people are experiencing in their daily lives. You're not seeking it out, but you're encountering it — in an environment where you're being cared for."

The Alta, 1401 North Montebello Blvd., Montebello, Calif.; altamedart.org/thealta. The art history of this era is still being written, and now it has a warehouse of its own.