Monterey Museum of Art exhibits invite us to rethink who art is by and for.

Most of the Gonzales High School art and yearbook students who visited the Monterey Museum of Art on Tuesday, April 9, had never before set foot in the museum. But Executive Director Corey Madden had a clear message to share with them: “We really want you to feel at home and comfortable in the museum.”

That was perhaps made easier thanks to the reliability of photographer Joe Ramos, who was raised in the Harden Labor Camp south of Soledad. He studied photojournalism at Hartnell College, then got into fine art photography as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. The exhibit of his black-and-white photographs now showing at MMA features faces and places of significance to him over the past 56 years.

It was fitting that yearbook students joined him, given the scrapbook-like nature of this collection. There’s the Martinez family from his youth, notable for their garden in an otherwise muted labor camp. There’s a Salinas Valley lettuce field during the strike in 1971 (“I was probably out there with my parents,” GHS art teacher Jesús Velásquez says). There are portraits of Ramos’ own family – his Filipino father and Mexican mother and their relatives, Ramos’ son and his Black wife and their children. “We are all mixed,” Ramos said.

The name of the exhibit is Mixed Up – Connected. It’s part of a series of exhibits now on display at MMA, this one until April 21. The series, taken together, is an immersion in farmworker life and Latino culture and heritage. Upstairs, photographs by Dorothea Lange document the humanity of people during the Dust Bowl, with unspoken suffering communicated through their eyes, as well as ramshackle homes and vehicles beside them.

Ramos’ work is perhaps the most approachable – family portraits are as relatable as it gets – but the tone echoes Madden’s sentiment: This is your home, too.

That is explicit in the gallery next door, where Seeing Chicanx: The Durón Family Collection is on display until April 21. This is the first-ever museum collection to display a significant portion of the family art collection of Armando and Mary Salinas Durón of Montebello in Southern California.

The Duróns are not artists – he is a court commissioner, she works for the FDIC. In 1981, they began acquiring artwork by Chicano artists, with a big vision in mind. “I decided, as a Chicano, I needed to be engaged in the acquiring of our people’s patrimony,” Armando Durón says. “I realized that the only thing that lasts of any people is their art. That’s how we know the Greeks, the Mayans, a lot of peoples. What survives and who collects that and who interprets that is very important in how a people are perceived.”

The Duróns have since amassed nearly 700 works of art in different mediums and more than 3,000 pieces of ephemera – invitations to art shows, brochures and the like. They change what’s displayed on the walls of their home roughly every two years, with a lot in storage at any given time. There are 92 works on display at MMA, and those works give a sense of the depth and breadth of “Chicano art” – it is as varied as the people who conceive of and create it, in both message and style. The Duróns set out to establish a narrative and show what Chicano art could be and what it could look like, from a Chicano perspective.

Of course, this narrative is already part of the art world. The fourth exhibit of the season, on display until April 14, is titled Harvesting California: From the WPA Era to the Present, featuring works from MMA’s permanent collection featuring farms and farmworkers. As Weekly staff writer Agata Popeda has written, the collective effect is to reveal the connection between art and agriculture.

And back on Ramos’ student tour, that link becomes obvious. A striking landscape shows a view of the Gabilan Mountains, farmworkers in the foreground, perhaps thinning lettuce. Another farm landscape includes chemical tanks. “At first I was kind of upset the tanks are there, but that’s part of the scene in the Salinas Valley now,” he said.

Ramos turned his childhood home into fine art. Right nearby at Gonzales High School, he and MMA staff recently led a fine art photography workshop (using smartphones), capped by the museum tour.

Sara Rubin is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com.