At the Alta Center, Chicano Art and Activism Walk Hand in Hand

The Alta, a new free public art space near downtown Los Angeles, holds a collection of Latino art infused with the spirit of the Chicano civil rights movement.

The Alta in Montebello, Calif., opens Sunday with a major collection of Chicano, Latino and Mexican art. Above, an exhibition “LA LA LA” by the photographer Patssi Valdez.Credit...Jennelle Fong for The New York Times

In the last seven months, Los Angeles has cut the ribbons on an astonishing number of high-profile museum projects: a blob-shaped building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, and this week, a 200,000-square-foot expansion at the California Science Center that harbors the space shuttle Endeavour in launch position.

Over this same period, a free art space has been quietly taking shape on the city’s fringes. When it opens to the public on Sunday, the Alta, as it is known, will fill a void; the Los Angeles area will finally gain a major Chicano cultural center. The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture debuted to much acclaim in 2022, but The Cheech is more than an hour away, in Riverside.

Just 10 miles east of downtown, the Alta holds work from the AltaMed Health Services collection, the nation’s largest corporate collection of Chicano, Latino and Mexican art. It inhabits a squat warehouse next to a Tesla dealership in Montebello (an independent city contiguous to East Los Angeles). Behind its blank facades, you’ll find a pair of artist residency spaces, a visible storage room and a 3,200-square-foot gallery featuring rotating exhibitions. Currently on view is “LA LA LA,” centered on the photography of Patssi Valdez, who is perhaps best known as a co-founder of the influential art collective Asco.

Since the Alta’s soft opening in May, a small stream of visitors has arrived to see the art by appointment, but otherwise it has remained under the radar. During my visit, Pilar Tompkins Rivas, AltaMed’s chief curator and vice president for art, joked that the space has had the vibe of a speakeasy.

That will not be the case for much longer. Valdez, who grew up in East Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s, says the center is a boon for this historically Mexican American district. “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.”

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