RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT 10.16.25 THE CHEECH CELEBRATES TEXAS ARTISTS

The Cheech Marin Center in Riverside, California, Celebrates the Art of Tejas Latinos

A new Chicano exhibit, Soy de Tejas: A Statewide Survey of Latinx Art, at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture features more than 100 artworks spanning painting, sculpture, photography, fiber, video, and installation. The exhibition showcases 38 contemporary Latino artists who were born in or are based in Texas.  San Antonio, Texas curator Rigoberto Luna noted that their works “explore migration, family, labor, indigeneity, gender, and mythmaking while also celebrating humor, love, resilience, and the joy of everyday life.”  Soy de Tejas “is both a survey and a reunion,” said Luna.

The Cheech Museum is located in Riverside, California,  60 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. It is a marvelous museum situated in a former city public library.  It is one of the prime museums of Chicano art in America.  Harriett and I visited five museums in Los Angeles this summer, and only one museum had a Chicano art piece. This is quite disturbing.  Los Angeles has 4.8 million Latinos, 48% of the county’s residents. It is the largest Lartino population center in the United States. Sadly,  the Los Angeles Museums have failed the Latino community. We have visited The Cheech several times, and we know it appreciates and celebrates diversity and inclusion. It proudly represents Latinos in Southern California and the nation.

“The value of The Cheech is that it offers Chicano artists a venue to show their work. The art in this exhibit makes us think about issues affecting Chicano communities.”  Luna’s expansive knowledge of art and his talents as a curator have enabled him to seek out artists that many of us are unfamiliar with. The following information is drawn from his descriptions of the Soy de Tejas and the artists’ biographies.

Arely Morales is a Mexican-born, Texas-based Latina artist whose large-scale portrait paintings elevate and dignify Latino immigrant laborers in the United States. She received the 2019 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, has been featured in the New York Times and Texas Monthly, and was part of the 2024 Women to Watch exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

In Texas and much of the Southwest, Latinos are a major part of the workforce in agriculture, construction, and service industries. They build houses, repair roofs, harvest the crops, cook food, and clean hotel rooms. Morales’ painting of a worker carrying a ladder features one of those workers who keep our communities running. Her paintings highlight the emotional complexity and vulnerability of the lives of immigrant workers. Focused on class-based exploitation and physical hardship, she offers an intimate view into their communities, seeking greater recognition of their contributions.

At age 14, Morales immigrated to Nacogdoches, Texas, an experience central to her vision. She earned a BFA in Painting and Photography from Stephen F. Austin State University in 2015 and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Washington in 2017, graduating with honors and receiving the de Cillia Graduating with Excellence in Research award. She has returned to Stephen F. Austin as a drawing instructor.

Morales’s recent works focus on immigrant laborers facing political division and discrimination. Inspired by Los Angeles artist Ramiro Gomez and former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, Morales creates vibrant portraits with direct gazes and symbolic backgrounds drawn from Mexican and Tejano culture.

Through her art, Morales transforms personal and collective narratives into visual statements that inspire empathy and awareness. Her painting of a woman dishwasher underscores both the struggles and dignity of Latino communities in contemporary America. Her work was recently featured in the exhibition The United States and Mexico: A Powerful Past, A Shared Future at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City.

Marianna Olague is a Mexican American artist from El Paso, Texas, known for her vibrant figurative paintings that depict life along the U.S.-Mexico border and the Mexican American experience. Her notable work “Customer Service Representative” (2020) was featured in The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today exhibition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and toured major U.S. museums. Olague’s practice also includes photography and hyperrealism, capturing borderland communities with detailed precision and a deep sense of place.

Olague finds inspiration in everyday life and familiar scenes in El Paso. Her brilliantly colored portraits highlight people and places meaningful to her, with the border—La Frontera—often appearing as fences or rock walls in her paintings. These structures symbolize both protection and the socioeconomic realities defining her subjects’ lives. Her work celebrates the low-income Mexican American community she grew up in through intricate and realistic depictions, revealing the unique beauty of the region.

Born and raised in El Paso, Olague earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas at El Paso and an MFA in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. She currently teaches drawing at UT El Paso. Her portraiture examines Mexican American identity in the 21st century, often modeling family and friends to reflect evolving roles and life challenges.

Olague’s contributions to the Cheech exhibit include colorful narratives rooted in border culture and Texas community life.  Her painting of a woman working in an auto repair garage underscores her commitment to recognizing the democratization of the workplace, where female workers were seldom seen. Olague has exhibited nationally in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit, with work held in collections including the Rubin Center and Cranbrook Art Museum. She received residencies at the Chinati Foundation and Künstlerhaus Bethanien and won the 2019 Mercedes-Benz Emerging Artist Award.

Gabriel Martinez (b. 1973, Alamogordo, New Mexico) is a Chicano/Latino artist, writer, and performer based in Houston, Texas. His diverse art practice focuses on environmental injustice affecting working-class Black and Brown communities. His work explores the intersection of art, public space, and community life.  An ARTADIA juror who awarded Martinez a 2024 prize noted that “Martinez has a polyphonic approach to art practice, as he experiments with textile, installation, sculpture, community space, sound, and ideas that extend beyond art, yet inherently connect it with politics and social reality.”

Martinez earned a B.F.A. from Corcoran College of Art and Design in 2001 and an M.F.A. from Columbia University in 2009. He also completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2010. Moving to Houston as a Museum of Fine Arts Core Fellow and artist-in-residence at Project Row Houses, he founded Alabama Song, an experimental art space for which he received a Robert Rauschenberg SEED Grant. Martinez was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant and was a 2022 Robert and Stephanie Olmsted Fellow at MacDowell.

 Through the use of found materials and politics of specific contexts, Martinez’s artwork explores the conditions of environmental injustice, which disproportionately affect working-class Black and Brown bodies. Two of his paintings in the exhibit feature hand-sewn paintings that incorporate garments found in city streets, situating him as one body among many shaping urban material culture. Martinez’s practice uses public art as a tool for social inquiry and change. He is expanding definitions beyond traditional forms through material engagement with urban environments.

Jenelle Esparza is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines the overlooked history of cotton and labor in South Texas. Through her textiles, she addresses themes of gender, identity, and race. Using found materials and repurposed heirlooms, Esparza reinterprets her family’s generations-long connection to cotton farming, confronting histories of violence and racial injustice woven into the region’s past.

In 2018, Esparza underwent a major artistic shift when she began weaving classes at the Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, setting aside her earlier practice in photography and printmaking. The medium came naturally to her, leading to her first large-scale woven work during her Artpace Residency that same year. The experience transformed her artistic focus entirely toward weaving, which she now pursues as her central practice.

Tracing three generations of her maternal ancestry to cotton farming, Esparza uses weaving to narrate stories of labor exploitation and social inequities. Her art reconstructs found objects and textiles to illuminate a personal and collective history of South Texas’s rural working communities. Over the years, she has received support from institutions such as Blue Star Contemporary, the McNay Art Museum, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC). In 2016, she joined the McNay as Museum Educator for Family Experiences, advancing its community outreach programs.

Esparza’s weaving practice is conceptual and experimental rather than traditional. Though she admires Navajo and Oaxacan weavers, she forges her own style, transforming fabric into abstract, storytelling forms that often defy the conventions of rugs or blankets. Her three textiles in the exhibit are drawn from family stories and historical events, inviting reflection on the cultural and economic legacy of South Texas’s borderlands.

Soy de Tejas: A Statewide Survey of Latinx Art at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture opened on October 4, 2025, and runs through January 11, 2026.

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Copyright 2025 by Ricardo Romo. All photo credits as indicated above.