ARTIST STATEMENT
My ultimate artistic goals have always been to seek healing and truth in response to the trauma we face when experiencing and rationalizing the current generational abuse of power and violence. I moved to Los Angeles with a desire to participate in the foundation of contemporary culture through visual art gatherings that resonate to others in my community, and to provide an open creative space where social and spiritual mending may take place. I collaborate with artist collectives to create value, organize principals, develop methods and provide networking systems that build successful artistic expressions that cross all borders and minds with justice.
BIOGRAPHY
Victoria Delgadillo works in various forms of visual art (painting, print, digital art, filmmaking, photography, textiles, audio-art), but her main art practice is in engagement and collaboration with collectives and communities through participatory art. She believes that displaying her work in non-traditional community accessible spaces, invites the under-valued audience to participate in the art discourse.
Delgadillo is an artist and activist graduate from the University of California, San Diego in 1973. She was one of the first 100 Chicano students enrolled at UCSD, where she studied film theory and video making.
In 2003, Victoria’s written account on the curatory process for the first international exhibit on the femicides in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico was published through UCLA press. For her work on creating public awareness through art, Victoria received awards from the Los Angeles City Council, the University of Sinaloa, Mexico and the Cultural Institute of León, Guanajuato, Mexico.
In 2009 Victoria received the University of California, San Diego’s Gracia Molina de Pick Feminisms grant awarded to women who are active in social justice & community service.
In 2010, Delgadillo co-organized an international month of femicide art activism events in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Fort Worth, Quebec, Mexico City, New York, Sydney, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque with a collaborator in Mexico City. These synchronized femicide exhibits brought forth many instances world-wide where the murder of women have been ignored by their governments.
In 2011, she (and a handful of activists) were honored with Self Help Graphics & Art’s first award, for collectively saving their print studios and programming from permanent closure. In 2013, Victoria curated a print atelier with the theme of Textiles at Self Help Graphics and Art.
Delgadillo was a panelist-exhibitor on themes of her art at 3 feminisms conferences: 2013 Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (Women Active in Letters and Social Change) at The Ohio State University, in 2013 at The International Congress of Women in the Americas (Axe 8 Arts) at the University of Aix Provence, France and the 2019 Gloria Anzaldúa : Translating B/borders Conference at the University of Paris VIII and The Sorbonne University, Paris, France.
Through the 2018 publication of “Regeneración, Three Generations of Revolutionary Ideology,” Delgadillo’s radical-social work in art is linked to the Chicano Movement’s crucially inspired ideology of Mexican anarchists, the Flores Magón brothers.
In 2019 Victoria’s select images from her ArtSlant page were Inducted into the Library of Congress digital web archive. In 2020 she received the J. Paul Getty Trust and the California Community Foundation Covid-19 Grant for individual artists that serve Los Angeles’ culturally diverse communities. In 2020 Professor Arlene Dávila of New York University, named Delgadillo as an artist everyone should know in her globally researched book “Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics.”
Victoria was an Artist in Residency at Cal-Poly Pomona participating in a feminisms art content think tank and critique lead by Judy Chicago that culminated in a future-themed final exhibition. She was also an Artist in residency twice at Self Help Graphics & Art’s fine art silk screen studios; one series on the The Contemporary Goddess and the other on the theme of Textiles.
As a presenter and panelist, her body of work has been featured on PBS television, National Public Radio, Salon.com, and Duke University’s publication “Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations,” as well as numerous periodicals and video interviews in the United States and Mexico.
Victoria Delgadillo has exhibited in the USA, China, Scotland, Cuba, France and Mexico. Her work is in the permanent art collections of the Los Angeles County Museum, Laguna Beach Museum, Vincent Price Art Museum, San Diego State University archive and The National Mexican Art Museum in Chicago in addition to various important Chicano public and private collections.
Her written work and lectures in art activism are part of the curriculums of the Universities of California at Berkeley/Los Angeles/Riverside/San Bernardino, Cal-State Universities Northridge/Los Angeles/Long Beach and San Diego and the University of Guadalajara (Guadalajara, Mexico).
