AltaMed, a major healthcare provider in Southern California, is opening an art gallery, library and cultural centre to house its art collection in the Los Angeles suburb of Montebello. AltaMed’s collection, more than 50 years in the making, includes works by Laura Aguilar, Graciela Iturbide, Gabriel Orozco and others. Its new 30,000-sq.-ft space, The Alta, opens to the public on Sunday (15 November).
AltaMed began collecting art in the 1970s, based on a belief that art is an integral part of holistic well-being. Since then, its collection has grown to some 4,000 pieces, with about 1,400 of them currently placed in its offices and clinics.
“Our collection focuses on Chicano art," Cástulo de la Rocha, the president and chief executive of AltaMed (and founder of the collection), said in a statement. "Because AltaMed was founded as part of the Chicano Movement in the 1970s, because I was active in the Chicano Movement, and because our patients and employees can connect culturally with the art.”
In recent years, AltaMed has been converting a warehouse on the edge of a shopping mall in Montebello to house its collection. The space will have regular hours for visitors to tour its gallery, see works on shelves and sliding racks in open storage, and watch behind-the-scenes processes of digitisation and conservation. There is also studio space for artist residencies on site.
Patssi Valdez and rafa esparza’s Sacred and Profane Beauty (2026) Courtesy AltaMed
“The collection is here to serve the communities that AltaMed is focused on in Los Angeles and Orange County, primarily Latino communities,” Pilar Tompkins Rivas, AltaMed’s chief curator and vice president of arts, tells The Art Newspaper. “So we think about art that is relevant and celebratory of those populations.”
Some recently acquired and commissioned works also address health and community—such as Sonia Romero’s mural The Fence-Pomona (2026), made expressly for the central communal space in a senior-care facility in nearby Pomona. The mural is 6ft high and 10ft wide, depicting a white lattice fence festooned with roses and the San Gabriel Mountains behind it. It ioverlooks a space used for meals, artmaking and gathering for patients.
AltaMed’s collection runs the gamut of media and spans more than 100 years, although most of the work was made after the Second World War. Early pieces include those of Hernando Gonzallo Villa, a commercial artist who famously designed ads and posters for the Santa Fe Railway. More recent works include drawings, prints and paintings by Carlos Almaraz, Judy Baca, Camille Rose Garcia, Gronk, Frank Romero, Eloy Torrez, John Valadez and Linda Vallejo.
The artist Felicia Montes at La Botánica del Barrio (2026) Courtesy AltaMed
The first exhibition in the gallery is Patssi Valdez: LA LA LA (until 9 April 2027), featuring photo-based and collage works by a pioneer of Los Angeles’s Chicano art movement. For this show, Valdez re-created some of her photography from the 1970s and 80s—portraits of friends that helped define punk and goth glamour.
She says she had discussed doing something “out of the box” with AltaMed, and several of the framed work have coloured strips of paper flying out from the frame. To highlight some of her portraits, Valdez added Swarovski crystals to the prints, such as in Divine Dede (2026) and Hot Pink (Mario, Charlie & DeDe) (1983/2025). She also co-created work in collaboration with two younger artists, rafa esparza and Gabriela Ruiz.
It has been more than a decade since Valdez had a solo exhibition. “AltaMed has been a collector of my work for quite a while and has been very supportive," she says. The company has purchased Valdez’s paintings and photography, and even one of her signature full-size paper dresses. One of these dresses is in a glass case in The Alta’s open-storage area.
Down the hall are the residency studios. The artist Rubén Esparza is working in one of them, where he has been making multimedia pieces featuring his "ongoing exploration of the cultural significance of Latinx, Chicano and Queer diasporas".
The other studio has been transformed into an educational apothecary by Felicia Montes and her collective Mujeres de Maíz. La Botánica del Barrio (2026) features displays of samplable traditional herbal teas and tinctures, as well as a decorated pushcart. In the hallway, The Wellness Wall lets visitors put up cards with their own home remedies and healing practices. Visitors have suggested some very practical cures—from "talk to friends" and "travelling" to "Vicks" and "a good mezcal".
