Sports Spotlight

The Riversider | December 2022

Riverside’s Homegrown Soccer Stars

WORDS: KEN CRAWFORD PHOTO: DAVID FOUTS

For those of us in Southern California, soccer has been part of the youth and recreational sports scenes for many decades. This is particularly true if you live in or nearby a significant immigrant population. For US born athletes, soccer was often seen as a transitional or secondary sport played in the off season or as an entree to “real” sports.

International superstar footballers, the success of the women’s national team, and concerns by parents about the long term health effects of playing American football has made soccer a firstchoice for many families. This has resulted in the creation of excellent youth leagues. We are really seeing the first fruits of that now with an unprecedented number of US players that play professionally in the best leagues around the world.

What does this have to do with Riverside? We are a soccer town. Our parks are filled with soccer teams training on weeknights and playing matches on weekends. We have competitive adult recreational and church-sponsored youth leagues. We have some excellent high school programs. Our two Division One college athletic programs at California Baptist University and UC Riverside don’t even have (American) football programs. However, they do have soccer teams—really good soccer teams. When CBU and UCR took the field as opponents this season, players from thirteen countries on five continents were on the rosters. Of all those places, coaches, and teams represented, when the whistle started play, only two of the young men there were from Riverside.

Issa Badawiya, of UCR, and Leo Mendez, of CBU, know each other. They both attended King High School at the same time. Their paths to this particular game are very much similar, but maybe not as much as you’d think of two guys that play the same sport attending the same high school.

Leo started playing soccer in Mexico when he was very young. When he moved back to California, he joined several clubs and eventually landed at Pateadores, which became Riverside City Football Club and is now Albion Riverside. Issa played in a few clubs before joining FC Golden State and eventually joined their Professional Development Academy team which took away his high school athletic eligibility. While they attended at the same time, they did not play together at King High.

They are participating on opposite sides of what has become a significant, multi-sport crosstown rivalry. Every team wants to win every game, but these schools want to beat the other every time on every field, court, pool, and gym where they meet. These games are a little faster and louder, and the fouls are harder and more frequent. At this level, all of these guys are good. The slouches were weeded out long ago. Neither school is an athletic powerhouse and most of these guys are here for the degree but, in the moment, they are competitors who have trained well and for a long time to get to where they are.

UC Riverside has competed at the D1 level since 1998. The Highlanders have graduated several players into soccer careers. Including Aaron Long who, represented the US at the FIFA World Cup. The Highlanders won the Big West tournament and lost in the first round of the NCAA Soccer tournament to Portland.

CBU has been around Riverside for over half a century but is just now emerging as a Division One athletic program. After a probationary transitional period, the Lancers have achieved

(L-R): Leo Mendez and Issa Badawiya full participant status in the Western Athletic Conference. They won their conference tournament the first year in order to make an appearance at the NCAA Soccer Tournament, where they lost in the first round to UCLA.

In head-to-head competition, UCR has won three of the five last meetings between the schools, but CBU has won the last two. Both Issa and Leo have made significant contributions to their teams throughout the season and in their careers. Neither scored in this year’s rivalry game, but Leo did get a yellow card. Leo and Issa both plan on weighing available soccer options after graduation, but both will have degrees and a solid plan B if needed. Leo has a year to think about it and Issa is applying to dental schools.

Issa has used all of his NCAA eligibility, so he has played his last UCR versus CBU match. Leo will be there next year. Issa will probably be there, as well, in the stands. These are good programs with great facilities and I encourage Riversider readers to participate in these events.

If you do, be sure to pick a side—east versus west, private versus public, religious versus secular, not knowing what a Lancer is, or fear of bears. All are good enough reasons and if none of those work, flip a coin.

The Elijah Parker House at 4631 Ladera Lane

BUILT IN 1927

Nestled in the hillside of one of Riverside’s

most prestigious neighborhoods and seemingly plucked from the picturesque Spanish Colonial Revival landscape of Santa Barbara, this 1927 home was designed by Robert Spurgeon, local architect extraordinaire. One of five contributing residences constructed by Robert Spurgeon on the southern side of “Little Mount Rubidoux” in the venerable Mount Rubidoux Historic District, the triangular-shaped property of the Elijah Parker House is prominent and stately while also private and elusive.

Driving along winding Ladera Lane—formerly known as Rubidoux Drive—it can be easy to miss the home among the steep front lawn, mature landscaping, and recessed street. Over the hedge, behind the large iron gate and up the three levels of stairs, one is transported to a bygone era noted for vibrant Mediterranean colors, ornate wrought iron details, red clay tile roofing, and flowery decorative tiles.

The hillside of Little Mount Rubidoux is peppered with homes similar in the Spanish Revival style. Notably, the home to the west of

WORDS: PHILIP FALCONE PHOTOS: ZACH CORDNER

1927

the Parker residence was built in 1923 by Robert Spurgeon for his parents and a later home across the street for his mother, following his father’s death. Little Mount Rubidoux’s terrain became the location of choice by Riverside’s wealthiest residents to construct their opulent Spanish Revival, Craftsman, Tudor Revival, and Mission Revival style homes at the turn of the 20th century. Both the close proximity and “far enough” distance to bustling downtown Riverside made the home’s location the right choice for automobile agency executive and citrus grower, Elijah Parker.

Elijah Parker, along with his wife, Margaret, and their only child, Robert, relocated to Riverside from Uniontown, Pennsylvania in 1916. Parker had worked with his father in Pennsylvania’s coal industry but was in search of a milder climate and new career come the second decade of the 20th century.

The Parker family settled in Riverside and Elijah went on to have two subsequent careers. Relocating to Riverside at forty-one years old, Parker quickly found success in a new career as a partner in a Ford automobile distribution company at Eighth and Lime Streets in downtown Riverside. After a decade in the automobile industry, Parker changed careers once more becoming an astute citrus grower and operating grove properties on Victoria Avenue and Blaine Street.

While Parker made his career change from automobile agency executive to citrus grower, he purchased the triangle lot on then Rubidoux Drive and enlisted architect Spurgeon and builder W.J. Nethery to create a home that embodied the revival styles of the west. On October 12, 1927, construction began on a twelve room, three bath, two story Spanish Colonial Revival home with Monterrey style influences commonly recognized through the second story balconies. The cost of constructing the home was $15,000. Workers of Nethery are said to have manufactured each red clay roof tile on site, molding the clay on their upper thighs to create the necessary carved shape. Views of the roofline from the rear, upper hillside of the property give a vantage point to see the character of each uniquely created tile.

By early 1928, the Parker family was settled into their new home at 81 Rubidoux Drive where they inhabited it for the next decade. Elijah Parker died on July 15, 1937 at age sixty-two and Margaret Parker went on to sell the home to relocate elsewhere in downtown. Elijah Parker’s final resting place is in a fluted, columnar urn behind glass in the Henry L.A. Jekel designed mausoleum at Olivewood Cemetery. Margaret Parker, who lived another four decades, died at age eighty-eight in 1977 and was interred at Olivewood Cemetery.

The largest room within the home’s 3,600 square feet is the living room with towering roughhewn wooden beams, which are embellished with iron, curled tip strapping. Original windows on every side of the living room frame the lush greenery and scenic views beyond. The dining room boasts ornamental plaster crown molding, a ceiling medallion, and built-in display cases for fine pottery. The expansive kitchen blends old and new with Shaker style cabinetry and terracotta tile flooring.

The beauty of the staircase is hypnotic with the whitewashed plaster walls, ornate Spanish style railings and sconces, the square red tile treads complimented with vibrant blue, orange, yellow, and green hand-painted tile risers.

On the second story landing, visible through the original wavy glass of the wooden windows, the rich green exterior trim contrasts with the red clay roof tiles—visible through the exposed eaves. In 1966, owner Sheila Weber installed a swimming pool in the rear of the home. Weber utilized the same midcentury-meets-Spanish style tile at the waterline of the pool and in the surround of the portal of the front door. Today, the waterline pool tile has been removed and replaced with navel orange themed tile handmade by current owner and decorative artist Christopher Brody. The midcentury tile surround of the front door, despite not being original, remains and compliments the Monterrey style façade.

The swimming pool sits at the base of steep uphill pathways through terraced landscaping that lead to the spear of the triangular-shaped property and showcases panoramic views of downtown Riverside.

In the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, the Elijah Parker house went through several notable owners, including eclectic designer and antique collector Alayne Coppo, who featured artifacts from all corners of the world. The home’s most famous owners were William “Knox” and Carlotta Mellon. Knox Mellon is nationally known within architecture and historic preservation circles as California’s first historic preservation officer, appointed by Governor Jerry Brown in 1975. Carlotta Mellon was also involved in politics as Mayor Ron Loveridge’s Chief of Staff in the 1990s.

Today the home remains in the hands of artists: illustrator and author Evan Turk and decorative artist Christopher Brody. Evan and Christopher have maintained the home with impeccable standards, adding features such as the Spanish and Moroccan style tiles surrounding the swimming pool—all handmade on site by Christopher. The connection

of the 1920s meeting the 2020s is striking with the main staircase’s pristine original Spanish tile selected by Spurgeon in 1927 and the exterior Spanish-inspired tile created for the pool deck by Brody in 2022. While named for its first owner, the front door of the Elijah Parker House opens to more than a home steeped with history and Spanish Colonial Revival style. It opens to nearly eighty-five years of stories of attentive preservation and care by owners for a home masterpiece created by one of Riverside’s most renown architects who sought to take European architectural ideas and blend them with Southern California lifestyles of the 1920s.

Dining Room

Second story landing

The Riversider | December 2022

Mission Wing with Campanario and Old Adobe, c1910, featuring Arts & Crafts Adirondack stick-style pergolas. Courtesy Museum of Riverside Hutchings Collection

“Both architecturally and in terms of boosterism, Frank Miller’s Mission Inn…pushed Lummis’s Spanish myth about as far as it could go, which in Southern California was very far indeed…. Beginning in the late 1890s, he embarked upon [thirty-five] years of architectural fantasizing, creating a Spanish Revival Oz: a neo-Franciscan fantasy of courts, patios, halls, archways, and domes, which he furnished with statuary, stained glass windows, and religious artifacts of Spain, Italy, and Mexico, gathered on pilgrimages abroad.”1 —Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream

The National Historic Landmark Mission Inn Building Frank Augustus Miller’s Franciscan Wonderland in Riverside, 1903-1931

WORDS: H. VINCENT MOSES MOSES, PHD AND CATHERINE E. WHITMORE

“This is the appropriate architectural style for Southern California.” —Gustav Stickley, Carftsman Magazine, 1904

The Riversider | December 2022

“Bully!” roared Theodore Roosevelt on the morning of March 8, 1903, while waiting for the official photograph at the Grand Opening of Frank Miller’s new Glenwood Hotel, California’s Mission Inn. Earlier that morning, the President, in top hat and tails, departed the Presidential Suite at the southeast corner of the hotel for the entrance of the Old Miller Adobe a few yards away. There, with Roosevelt-style bravado, TR bestowed his presidential blessing on Miller’s edifice. Miller knew this would be the perfect celebrity photo op for the grand opening. TR’s ceremonial replanting of the remaining Parent Navel Orange Tree that morning at the Mission Inn implied that the hotel, like Mission San Gabriel, had something to do with the introduction of citrus, in this case the Washington navel orange to Southern California. With that, Miller began the Spanish mythmaking around his soon-to-become Franciscan wonderland in Riverside. The grand opening came off without a hitch and set the hotel on its way to becoming the preferred winter resort of the great and near great for the next forty years. Ironically, the world-renowned Mission Inn began as an AngloAmerican hostelry. Captain C. C. Miller, Frank’s father, opened the original hotel as the Glenwood Cottage. Frank Miller purchased the Glenwood in 1880 from his father Captain C. C. Miller, subsequently renaming it the Glenwood Tavern. By 1898, the ambitious young entrepreneur had set about to replace the original facilities with a modern multi-story hotel, initially of typical eastern hotel design. He failed to secure financing and scrapped the project. Meantime, Riverside roared into the 1890s as the immensely prosperous home of the Washington navel orange, and the center of a rising Mission Cult in Southern California built on the growing popularity of the California Missions, which were then being vigorously promoted by Charles Fletcher Lummis and his California Landmarks Club. “Don Carlos” as Lummis called himself, for several years had sought a distinct Spanish image for the region to draw tourists and migrants West to California.

By the early 1890s, navel orange prosperity and the Mission myth had made Riverside a sought-after winter destination for well-heeled winter visitors. Seeking to capitalize on the Mediterranean like citrus landscape and the Lummis’ Mission myth, Miller revived his dream of expanding his hotel. Around 1899, he sought financing from Henry Huntington, owner of the Pacific Electric Railway, for expansion of his resort hotel. Huntington came though, financing the

President Theodore Roosevelt at the Grand Opening of the Glenwood Hotel, California’s Mission Inn, March 8, 1903. TR, pictured with shovel in hand preparing to replant the remaining Parent Navel Orange Tree at the Old Adobe. Courtesy Museum of Riverside The Presidential Suite where TR stayed the night. It's now The Presidential Lounge. Courtesy Museum of Riverside

Cloister Wing, Mission Inn, c1912. Arthur B. Benton, architect. Courtesy Museum of Riverside

construction for $100,000. The electric rail magnate, backing Lummis’ Mission Myth for Southern California, recommended that Miller commission Arthur Benton of Los Angeles, master Arts and Crafts architect, to design the building. Benton seized the opportunity and rendered the new hotel in an audacious Mission Revival architectural style, making a complete break with the original Anglo Glenwood Cottage style.

Benton argued that the rising Mission Style suited Southern California to a tee by maintaining fidelity to the heritage and Mediterranean climate of the region. Bertram Goodhue, the most preeminent Arts and Crafts Movement architect in America, agreed with Benton. Goodhue, too, argued that architects should maintain fidelity to place by designing to the heritage and terrain of the locale. Later as the designer of the Spanish Colonial Revival buildings at the 1915 PanamaCalifornia Exposition in Balboa Park, San Diego, Goodhue put his theory into practice. “In the East,” he said, “I design English-style churches and residential structures, but in the West, I design in Spanish motifs.” For Benton and Goodhue, the Mission Revival made sense for Miller’s hotel.

By 1931, with the full build out of the Inn, the initial Mission Revival architectural style merged with Spanish Baroque Churrigueresque, Moorish, Italian Renaissance, Chinese and Japanese styles to complete Miller’s eclectic fantasy. At completion, Miller’s hotel featured gargoyles, domes, statues, fountains, carved pillars, flying buttresses, Tiffany windows, and dozens of pieces of Arts and Crafts furnishings by Gustav Stickley, Elbert Hubbard, Limbert, and others. By 1931, the Inn stood proud as a monument to Frank Miller’s Arts and Crafts inspired imagination and entrepreneurship.

The Spanish eclectic makeup of the fully developed Mission Inn came about this way. As Frank Miller watched Riverside’s Mediterranean Revival Style Civic Center take shape in the late teens and 1920s, he moved decisively and relentlessly to keep his hotel ahead of the pace. Through a constant construction program from 1911-1931, involving multiple additions and renovations, Miller brought the original Mission Revival masterpiece into the complete and

The Riversider | December 2022

G. Stanley Wilson, architect with construction crew completing the Rotunda, International Wing, 1931. Courtesy of Pete Weber

unsurpassed embodiment of both phases of the Spanish Colonial Revival. First came the Cloister Wing or Monastery in 1911, designed by Arthur Benton roughly on the architecture of the Carmel Mission. The transformation from Mission Revival to mature Spanish Colonial Revival began in 1913, after Miller’s grand tour of Europe, when he commissioned Myron Hunt to design the Spanish Wing, including the Spanish Patio, Spanish Dining Room, and Spanish Art Gallery. Built of reinforced slip-form concrete, the addition marked the dual advance of the Mediterranean Revival, and modern construction materials and methods at the Inn. Arthur Benton and local architect G. Stanley Wilson, who supervised construction of Hunt’s Spanish Wing, designed the third and fourth floors. The north elevation features the Alhambra Court, Miller’s ode to Alhambra Castle, Granada, Spain. A row of spires, atop faux buttresses, infer minarets from a Spanish or North African mosque. The front façade of the Court is clad in hollow tile, like tile found at Alhambra. Miller completed a final addition, the International Wing, between 1929 and 1932, with G. Stanley Wilson, Riverside’s most prolific architect of the Spanish Colonial Revival, especially for schools and civic structures. Wilson, born in Bournemouth, England, came to Riverside in 1895 with his family. Graduating high school in Riverside, Wilson rose far and fast through the ranks of apprentice carpenter and finish carpenter to self-taught architect via correspondence school courses, becoming a licensed architect in 1923. By the time Wilson received Miller’s commission for the Inn’s International Wing, his firm had grown into a full-service shop. The Inn and Wilson benefitted immeasurably from the arrival of Peter Weber, who brought with him substantial artistic and architectural skills, honed from his travels in Southern Spain and North Africa. Weber became Wilson’s most important designer in the true Mediterranean Revival Style, viral to the final two phases of the Mission Inn.

Weber’s skills enabled Wilson to make his most significant contributions to the National Historic Landmark Mission Inn; especially the International Wing, which includes the International Rotunda, the Court of the Orient, and the iconic Atrio of Saint Francis Addition.

“The International Wing comprises the entire northwest corner of the Inn and was built between 1929-31 out of reinforced concrete. The walls, beams, floor slabs, and exterior walls are of reinforced concrete. The fourth-floor rooms are all hollow tile construction with

Rotunda

Saint Francis Chapel

DOUGLAS MCCULLOH DOUGLAS MCCULLOH

Atrio of Saint Francis

concrete roof framing supporting clay tile roofs,” and “organized around three interior courtyards, all of which were ornately decorated in the spirit of international harmony.”

The six-story Rotonda Internationale (International Rotunda) constitutes the first court, rising the full height of the building and opening to the sky. The Court of the Orient makes up the second component of the wing, finishing with the Atrio of St. Francis, Wilson’s opus in the Spanish Renaissance Revival Style, with ornate Churrigueresque details. The whole building “varies in height from the four-story Mission Wings and seven-story Rotunda to the four commanding towers, Carillon, Carmel, Amistad and Agua, with many courts and elevations.”

The Atrio of Saint Francis drew rave reviews from the venerable California Arts and Architecture:

“Architecturally, the Atrio of St. Francis will be considered the piece de resistance of Mission Inn. It might be the plaza of a small city of Mexico or Spain. The facade of the Chapel of St. Francis is the chief architectural feature…. Facing it from the entrance, one feels as if standing in front of a cathedral in a quiet plaza of Old Mexico. The Churrigueresque rich ornamentations, the rose windows, the coats of arms, the figures of saints in their niches—all are beautiful, and all seem as if they must be of some bygone age. The proportions of facade and doorway and rose window are splendid. Huge sixteen-foot mahogany doors give entrance. The interior, dimly lighted, reveals its richness slowly to one entering from the brilliant sunlight of the Atrio. At the far end is the famous gold altar from Mexico…. Its surface and columns and figures have lost none of the lustre…they had two hundred years ago when the altar was made for the chapel of Marquis de Rayas at Guanajuato. Carved oak stalls of Renaissance design with medallions from an ancient monastery in Belgium occupy the sides of the chapel from the entrance to the chancel and above them, glowing and sparkling in all their color, are the Tiffany windows and mosaics, three on each side.”

The Atrio brought the Mission Inn to the pinnacle of the mature Spanish Colonial Revival, and to the forefront of the region’s infatuation with the style.

Today, the National Historic Landmark Mission Inn occupies a full city block at the heart of Riverside’s downtown Civic Center, functioning once again as a five-star hotel, sponsoring a massively successful Festival of Lights every December that draws thousands of visitors to downtown Riverside. This author recommends that you take your family and friends to view the Inn during this year’s Festival Lights. It will make your holiday season bright, I promise. You will also experience the result of Frank Miller’s extraordinary imagination, which endowed Riverside with the one-of-a-kind National Historic Landmark Mission Inn.

Author’s Row and Alhambra Court, Mission Inn, 2016.

The opening of The Cheech Center for Chicano Art in June of 2022 has made a monumental contribution to the Riverside community with a significant impact on the international art scene. The first and only museum of its kind, “The Cheech” is home to hundreds of works by Chicano artists from Cheech Marin’s personal collection and has gained recognition as a destination for thousands of visitors both near and far.

Upon entering The Cheech, guests are met by an enormous installation by the De la Torre brothers depicting the Aztec Earth Goddess, “Coatlicue.” The brightly lit piece impressively towers two stories high inside the museum’s front lobby and uses a unique lenticular design that creates a holographic 3D effect, transforming its imagery as viewers move around the room. While the installation will permanently remain at The Cheech, their exhibit, “Collidoscope: De la Torre Brothers Retro-Perspective” will only be on display through January 22, 2023.

Administered by The Smithsonian Latino Center in partnership with the Riverside Art Museum, the extensive collection occupies the entire second floor gallery and features dozens of works spanning three decades of the De la Torre brothers’ career. The rare opportunity to have a collection of such magnitude displayed here in downtown Riverside makes it urgent for visitors to experience the exhibit before it moves on to cities throughout the country.

Visitors who have seen the collection can attest to its profound impact and a complexity that almost eludes description. The duo’s intricate compositions challenge the viewers’ senses and invoke emotion through a powerful use of multiple mediums and techniques ranging from glassblowing, sculpture, and lenticular design to material culture and audio/visual components. They explore an array of themes from Pre-Columbian and traditional Mexican art to consumer culture, religion and sexuality, and use humor and irony to create a dialogue, opening interpretation from their audience.

Just as their art consists of many complex layers, Einar and Jamex De la Torre’s binational upbringing and bicultural identity undoubtedly influenced their artistic ideology. They were transplanted at a young age from their home in Guadalajara, Mexico to the sunny beaches of Dana Point in 1972 following their parents’ separation. The brothers experienced extreme culture shock and were forced to overcome the many challenges that came along with it.

With no previous knowledge of English, they struggled to assimilate to American culture but found solace in art as a creative outlet, initially influenced by their older brother’s interest in it. They eventually made the decision to pursue professional careers in art. Both attended Cal State Long Beach where Jamex received a BFA in Sculpture and where they were introduced to several other mediums including glassblowing, which remains at the foundation of their work.

Today, Einar and Jamex continue to work together and maintain their bi-national identities by owning homes and traveling between studios in both San Diego and Baja California, Mexico. When I asked about the challenges of balancing their personal and professional lives, Jamex replied, “it is tricky at times, but adds so much to our lives. It has been a great deal of what we’re about as artists; being able to cross the border and change from one brain to the other seamlessly is a lot of what we talk about in our work”.

This balance and the theme of duality is but one of the many layers explored in their work and recognizable in their elaborately detailed compositions. “We’re obviously not minimalists, we’re if anything maximalists, with a ‘more is more’ attitude,” Einar explains.

While the complexity of their work can at times overwhelm its viewers, the De la Torre brothers recognize that art can push its audience outside of

Einar and Jamex De la Torre working with glass blowing students during their recent arts residency at CSU San Bernardino.

their comfort zone. “People don’t see art like they hear music. People know what they like in music and everybody thinks they have good taste in music, but art still frightens them a little bit,” Einar explains.

Just as art can challenge its viewers’ perspectives, Jamex and Einar also understand the importance of keeping it universally accessible. “Everybody should be able to have their opinions of art regardless of education or economic levels, it should be for everybody”.

The brothers eventually met Cheech in the 1990’s as a longtime collector of Chicano art, but their relationship with him actually began years prior. As Jamex explains, “coincidentally our history with Cheech really starts when we first emigrated to the United States because we emigrated to Dana Point, an area where there wasn’t any Chicano culture in the 1970’s, but our cousins were listening to the Cheech and Chong records and we were fascinated by their accent and, of course, they are still so funny.” Einar adds, “we’re going to school learning English because all we knew was Spanish, and here’s somebody doing “Spanglish” in a sort of street vernacular. That’s how we learned humor in a way, and how to access humor when we learned why it was funny. Of course, we enjoyed it tremendously, but it was also very formative in the way that we learned English.”

With this early understanding, the De la Torres utilize humor and irony to engage their viewers,

Jamex with one of their glass sculptures at CSU San Bernardino. allowing them to take a deeper look at traditionally taboo subjects like sexuality and religion. Einar describes this approach, “humor is like a gateway drug. The idea is to entice people to stop and maybe by getting a little giggle they’ll get in there a little more.” While audiences may not always be engaged as intended, “some people may laugh and walk by and that’s fine, too,” Einar adds. “Everyone brings their own circumstances to viewing art.”

In the creative process, the cohesion of Jamex and Einar’s individual contributions is essential when collaborating together. “We realized that as individuals, we were bringing different things as opposed to fighting it, which of course, there is still some struggle, but you struggle with yourself when you work with yourself, and there’s always limitations and that’s part of the dialogue; you’re limiting yourself to this canvas or whatever medium you’re working with.”

Freeing themselves from such limitations allows for complete artistic freedom and makes their work distinguishable in a contemporary setting. “I think art needs to be completely free, it needs to be unencumbered by any obligation,” Jamex explains. “We go to great lengths to not have a linear process and do everything we can to allow ourselves complete freedom.” With this freedom comes opportunity. Einar adds, “art has to be able to get away with things. We have to be able to talk about everything. That’s why there were art movements to begin with, because they were breaking rules”.

Although the many layers of their art may be visually intricate and address a multitude of themes, beneath its surface the De la Torre brothers are simply speaking to the nature of the human spirit and its delicate complexities. “We like to say that our work has many layers, in meaning that the layer in which we collaborate, the layer of being binational, and the many layers of understanding our reality. We’re expressing that the human condition and our reality is never black and white, it’s all of these layers at the same time”.

Just as the most detailed composition must begin with a simple idea, the many layers of the De la Torre brothers’ lives had to align seamlessly in order to make their “Collidoscope” exhibit a reality. From their early exposure to Cheech Marin’s humor and its influence on their understanding of language, to eventually meeting him in person through the Chicano art movement, the Cheech Center was destined to be their exhibit’s inaugural home.

Catch “Collidoscope: De la Torre Brothers RetroPerspective” at The Cheech before the exhibit closes on January 22nd. Purchase tickets at riversideartmuseum.org