Noticias

The decades-spanning art and activism of the Chicano collective Asco — named after the Spanish word for “disgust” — gets a generously researched and superbly edited portrait in filmmaker Travis Gutiérrez Senger’s “Asco: Without Permission.” This vibrantly pieced-together and well-sourced documentary, which premiered at SXSW, shows how a group of East Los Angeles Mexican-American artists reacted to the shifting social tides of the time, including racism and police abuse pressing force on their community.

The film features terrific archival footage of Los Angeles in the 1970s, when Asco started, through the ‘80s, a city riven by protest and violence and a feeling of, well, disgust about the political moment. “Without Permission” captures a time and place when Chicanos were the invisible, inaudible minority covered as a mere fascination out of newscasts, and its community was being tear-gassed for protesting among other American catastrophes the Vietnam War.

Gutiérrez Senger interviews key members of the collective,...

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Cheech Marin — who gained lasting fame as half of the pioneering stoner-comedy duo Cheech & Chong starting in the ’70s before making his own way acting in film and television — thought it was kismet. He had just learned that the “beautiful midcentury building” he’d been offered to house his leading collection of art by Chicanos (an identifier for people of Mexican descent born in the U.S.) was 61,420 square feet. “Four-twenty, you say?” he recalls five years later. “Thank you, Lord! It felt like this was meant to happen.”

The “this” Marin is referring to is the new Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum — or The Cheech, for short — which is opening June 18 in the former downtown public library building of Riverside, California. It will feature paintings, photographs, sculptures and drawings from an A-list of the Chicano art movement,...