AltaMed Art Collection

Based in Los Angeles, California, the AltaMed Health Services’ (AltaMed) mission is to eliminate disparities in health care access and outcomes by providing superior quality health and human services through an integrated world-class delivery system for multiethnic and underserved communities in Southern California. AltaMed operates over 60 primary care and dental clinics in Orange and Los Angeles Counties.

AltaMed has its roots in the Brown Berets in East Los Angeles who built the East LA Barrio Free Clinic in 1969, allowing the Spanish-speaking community access to quality, affordable healthcare in their native language. AltaMed expanded beyond the first clinic to work towards eliminating barriers to access medical services and ensure that historically vulnerable neighborhoods and communities have access to quality healthcare. AltaMed works to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate care and create workforce pipelines, while advocating for healthcare policy and voter rights.

As part of its holistic approach to healthcare, AltaMed exhibits AltaMed’s Art Collection (Collection), which is curated in the AltaMed corporate offices in City of Commerce, CA, but also throughout its clinics and service sites whose subjects reflect the diverse communities they serve. The arts are used in a variety of ways to heal emotional injuries, build empathy, develop an introspective capacity, and alter thinking patterns. Engagement with art helps reduce stress and depression and can alleviate the burden of illness. The collection is comprised of approximately 4,000 works of art in various media, including prints, paintings, photographs, drawings, sculpture, and mixed media. AltaMed hires artists to teach classes to its patients, and commissions artists to create murals and sculptures at its clinics. AltaMed also regularly loans its artwork to exhibitions that travel around the U.S. and the world, and curates local and global exhibitions, often working with guest curators.

In 2018, the AltaMed Art Collection collaborated with the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura in Mexico to co-create the traveling exhibition Building Bridges in Time of Walls, across 7 cities throughout Mexico, highlighting commonalities between Los Angeles and Mexico by showcasing works of nearly 30 Chicanx and Latinx artists from Los Angeles and the U.S. Additionally in 2022-23, AltaMed presented 54 diverse works of Chicanx art from its collection entitled In Your Face: Chicano Art After CARA (Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation) in collaboration with the Embassy of Mexico and Instituto Cervantes in Rome, Italy and the Mexican Cultural Institute in Berlin, Germany, and the Embassy of Mexico in Spain as part of the Madrid’s Veranos de la Villa festival.

In 2024, AltaMed will open a 25,000 sq. ft art space in Montebello, CA that will provide cultural and educational programming to serve the local community as well as the larger arts community. The space will support students, scholars, collectors, and museum professionals at all levels, host scholarly presentations tied to the collection, offer studio space to artists, and serve as a meeting space and extensive open storage. By 2028, AltaMed expects to break ground on a Chicanx and Mexican Art Museum located in downtown Los Angeles. The future museum will be the first of its kind to focus exclusively on modern and contemporary Chicanx and Mexican art in Los Angeles.

The Curator is part of a 5-person team lead by Associate Vice President and Chief Curator Susana Smith Bautista, and operates within the Office of the CEO.