An historical overview of Regeneracion art space (1992ish -2000) was presented for the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time at The San Diego Museum (May 2, 2015). Attendees commented on the interesting history of this collective and their international work in social justice–how exciting it was to hear of events of such scale occurring in a seemingly quiet area of Los Angeles.
“Caught Between a Whore and an Angel” the first women’s exhibit at Regeneracion was produced by Patricia Valencia, Aida Salazar, Elizabeth Delgadillo Merfeld and Victoria Delgadillo in 1996. The idea to have a women’s show at Regeneracion was Patricia Valencia’s — inspired by Sub-comandande Ramona, Cecilia Rodriguez and the other Zapatista women in Chiapas coming to the forefront in leadership.
The show’s concept of living art as opposed to the usual paintings hung on the wall, complimented “In the Red,” (the first men’s performance exhibit at Regeneracion)–which was the idea of Elizabeth Delgadillo Merfeld. Elizabeth also created the publicity image from a backdrop Patricia Valencia and Victoria Delgadillo painted on red cloth, using a photo projected image of a 1910 Zapatista soldada. Aida Salazar was the brilliant show organizer/producer. As an community organizer, Victoria Delgadillo established written and verbal communication updates with the participating artists, helping them to problem solve administrative matters, as well as persuaded everyone to include men in the show. Sometimes the whole family needs to come together, just as we women had helped with In the Red. There was a tremendous amount of work to put this show together, using our only resource: a network of friends.
Later, Claudia Mercado and Felicia Montes, the founders of Mujeres de Maiz noted that “Caught Between a Whore and an Angel,” inspired the inception of Las Mujeres de Maiz. Its interesting to see how art can grow and inspire great things. Regeneracion had many participants and many stories of art, music, words and resistance. This is just one of them.
“The body of a woman is also a battleground ” -Cecilia Rodriquez, EZLN (1995)
(below) The Mexican Spitfires (Elizabeth Delgadillo Merfeld, Patricia Valencia & Victoria Delgadillo) created “La Moda” as their offering for the Caught Between a Whore and an Angel exhibit. It stars Marco Trejo aka DJ Yaqui (†), Patricia Valencia and Elizabeth Delgadillo Merfeld. Victoria Delgadillo filmed in the Direct Cinema genre style which took 1 hour. The script was spontaneously decided by the group during costume changes. After filming, it took Victoria 3 hours to create the synchronized sound track using her personal record collection and transcribing them onto a cassette tape. This film was created with a hand held video recorder shot in sequence (no edits) and a separate cassette tape for the sound. Artists Alma Lopez transferred the Video into a digitized MP4, later Martin Sorrondeguy & Rigo Maldonado added the cassette soundtrack to the digitized film.