It's a battle won for Cheech Marin

After more than seven years on the road, the Chicano art collection of Cheech Marin has finally come home. Its last stop is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the hometown venue that initially turned down a show that toured nationally and drew large crowds as "Chicano Visions." A scaled-down version, titled "Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A.," opens Sunday at LACMA West. It features almost 50 paintings by some of the most influential members of the first generation of Chicano artists, including Gronk, Patssi Valdez and three of the original members of Los Four -- Frank Romero, Carlos Almaraz and Gilbert "Magu" Lujan -- the collective featured in what is considered the country's first major Chicano art exhibition, shown at LACMA in 1974.

For Marin, who championed Chicano art as his personal crusade, it's not only a triumphal homecoming but a vindication for his campaign to place these artists squarely in the American mainstream. "With LACMA, it's been love-hate toward the Chicano community since the beginning," says Marin, best known as half of the comedy team of Cheech and Chong. "We've always been treated as the stepchildren. But I think that attitude is turning around now. . . . They can't ignore us anymore."

The museum's attempt to acknowledge Chicano art, spotty as it has been, predates even the earliest piece in this exhibition, Almaraz's surreal but now familiar depiction of an accident on a freeway overpass, "Sunset Crash" (1982). But exhibitions devoted to the field have been few and far between. That problem was meant to be resolved by LACMA's Latino Arts Initiative, launched in 2004. The initiative's first major show, "Phantom Sightings," currently on display, marked the first time LACMA has organized its own exhibition of contemporary Chicano art. ("Los Four" was organized by UC Irvine.)

Marin meanwhile pursued his own parallel initiative, resulting today in two overlapping Chicano art shows, an embarrassment of riches. "There's almost a positive sense of disbelief that you would have two very different Chicano art exhibitions at the same time, not just in L.A., but at the same museum," says Chon Noriega, head of the LACMA initiative, a joint effort with UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center, where he's also director. "But you realize there's a lot of space in between here that we haven't even begun to cover."