“I’m really excited,” said Marin, who will turn 72 on Friday and performs a sold-out show with Chong Saturday at Pala Casino Spa & Resort. Jerry Brown includes $9.7 million for Marin’s museum. The $139 billion California state budget signed June 27 by outgoing Gov. The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Culture and Industry, scheduled to open in 2020 in Riverside, will feature 700 of the paintings, sculptures and drawings he’s collected.
He will soon have a permanent home for his collection. Yet, as he demonstrated in a recent phone interview from Los Angeles, the insightful Marin is earnest, articulate, and devoted to broadening the public’s appreciation of the Chicano art he has been collecting for the past four decades. That may be why, at the age of 71, Marin’s public persona is still largely that of a perpetually stoned proto-slacker from East L.A.
