What happens if women begin to make the images of the future?
What if we REFUSE the images of oppression, separation and sexism and make our own images and stories? As far as I’m concerned, we have to.
It has long been understood that those who control the images and stories control the culture. We have to change that. If you have tracked at all the increase in violence and murder of women since the ‘lockdown’ you will see that the largest pandemic is still, violence against women.
The art we make at MUSEA : Intentional Creativity – IS INTENTIONALLY DESIGNED as the ANTIDOTE. Women creating healing image for themselves and choosing non-violence, empowerment and sovereignty.
Dear Ones,
Today I’m in the studio filming for ARTIFACT. This is the last call to join us and study hot off the press Intentional Creativity material in connection with the feminine, storytelling, history, mother tongue writing, consciousness and more.
Those who complete will be invited to be part of a GLOBAL ARTIFACT Virtual show and event through our MUSEUM. I can pretty much guarantee you will not have seen any images like this before! This is the first set of rigorous and glorious paintings created with the intent to show the work in the living museum (for those who choose).
I want to acknowledge that those joining us are making a significant commitment in their work: 3+ months of focus, materials, admission fee – etc. and there will be other opportunities in the future. Yet this is the first event of it’s kind! It is pretty hard to get into a gallery or museum these days for living artists no matter how talented or successful you are – so we are making our own museum and show.
For ARTIFACT there is no painting experience required, the first video goes over the primary painting techniques that I use.
Payment plans + partial scholarship available as needed on the registration page. Have a question? Contact sarah@musea.org. If you feel called we will work with you. All resources from this course literally go towards the women who work with us at our museum and school.
If you are part of the Red Thread Cafe –
I will be doing a Facebook Live there today.
1pm HT | 4pm PT | 7pm ET | 1am CEST | 9am AEST | 11am NZST
A few topics to explore:
- COLLECTIVE PRAYER
- SEEKING ANCESTOR SUPPORT
- MEDICINE DRAWING
As we complete registration for ARTIFACT, my only new available online painting course, I want to talk to you about why making art of women by women matters, truly. Art that is not created in the image of over-culture, oppression, consumerism and vogue magazine. We are so done there. This is part of my curatorial work going forward – to change the paradigm.
If you cannot join us for Artifact but want to experience the power of Intentional Creativity – consider Hydra’s Flare – practiced by thousands of women in our community.
Red Thread Letter #811: Why Making Art Matters
WHY MAKING ART WILL
make a difference in the near future
for women of all colors and cultures.
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Imagine the world of image and language populated with the work of women, defined by women for women. That is what we are up to, and we are fierce, yet walk with the power of peace in the palms of our hands.
Your Art Matters.
What Artifact Will You Leave For the Future to Find?
In hundreds of years when archeologists and philosophers find our paintings, sculptures, textiles, songs, stories and recipes, who will they say we are?
What kind of culture will they deduce that we as a society valued? Will our individual objects of art represent only our personal view or will they include a transpersonal perspective?
Will our images show our racism, sexism and internalized oppression? Will they show we are asleep and entrained to violence, fake news and over-sexualization of girls?
Not in our community they won’t. We are painting a VERY different picture.
Intentional Creativity Teachers sign the back of their paintings with this seal. A gold circle surrounded by a red circle. Sue Sellars used to sign her paintings with a gold thumbprint with red writing.
Why? So that in 100 years, when the community living now is returned to stardust and others find our paintings throughout the world, they will know we were connected. Yes, we are thinking that far into the future. We are already 4 generations into the passing on of this teaching from hand to hand.
As one of the most well-established art movement in the world, Intentional Creativity is calling women and those that love them to begin to paint a new picture. Now.
.If you think I am placing too much responsibility on the artists to tell a story, then revisit the reality that the majority of the history of humanity has been told in just a few ways. The discovery of art, tools, objects and markings and the subsequent interpretations of what is found by those who tell the stories.
Unfortunately, those who tell the stories of humanity based on their findings do so, often at the cost of truth. They picture what they want us to believe happened. Mostly white dudes, but that isn’t news. We have known that for a few thousand years.
A story in a museum is often told through the perspective of those who are in power and tell the story to serve their own purposes – often destroying, hiding and stealing objects and narratives that would threaten their invented hierarchy. And let me be very clear, hierarchy and the meaning it holds for humans, is always invented. So who is the inventor?
Invented hierarchies keep us fooled by only showing the images and the stories that serve the designed agenda.
To complicate matters, artists have often been paid by the establishment to tell the narrative of those in power. So can we trust the findings? Starting about 1500 years ago you can’t trust the art to tell a truthful story. And so it goes throughout history, being told most often by those who have colonized land, enslaved human beings, harmed earth and established codes of inequality that persist for thousands upon thousands of years. So much so that we don’t even see it anymore – it has become the paradigm.
For example, the images and few writings of the feminine that have been found are the ONLY reason we know there is something more than the current paradigm of power-over systems. The less than 60-year-old archaeological evidence of feminine artifacts point to women as valuable, powerful, and even worshipped. Without these artifacts, we might have thought that the power over structures was simply, how things are. The legend behind these findings – were largely written out to serve the dominant voice. Not in all cases, but if you consider that museums and global represent less than 2% of women’s voices – it gets pretty f*cking obvious.
Here is a painting I did over 18 years ago called Curenderas – I wanted to show an image of the women I work with in my community, my teachers, my colleagues. To show our togetherness, and our stand and gifts, and fierceness. I wanted to paint a different picture. I was pregnant at the time, and so this is the energy of what I wanted to share with my child – an image of women in power was what I created. I lost the baby weeks after. I was never able to have children, but because of my desire to serve the children of the future, our vision is big and getting ever more clear.
To put things in context, unless your Grandmothers lived in a culture that was unbroken or in a culture that honored the feminine, they would not have known there was another choice for God, other than the masculine. We can easily see how this enforces inequality if there is only one gender of deity or one race. Often, if masculine and feminine are together, one is seen as secondary to the other. Guess who. So when you doubt your power as a woman artist and storyteller, I invite you to a new framework!
What if the future depends on the story you are telling and the images you are making? What would be different if you considered yourself as THAT relevant and essential? As if what you make with your life and your love actually matters to such a degree that the future will be different without your contribution. Sisters, I feel this deeply in my encoded memory.
I believe, with all of my being that the just, equitable and joyful potential future is a chosen design – the question is – who will be the designer? If not you, then who? But not just you, you in collaboration with a diversity of voices, will shape a present and a future we can live into – as well as reveal the past in a more truthful light.
Life is art. The question is if you are living it as art. And. What artifacts will you choose to create, destroy or discover?
How does each one of our unique threads work alongside with other threads, to weave a common vision without diluting the power of sovereignty?
The context for the Vision for MUSEA: Intentional Creativity is a Living Museum and installation curated by Artists. While our museum does have a permanent collection, and a lineage of art makers, our focus is what is alive for us now, what matters to us right now, and how artists are often the relevant voices giving rise to the revolution.
Would you like to be a part of our Museum Member Community and help make possible the advancement of virtual museum craft, furthering of women’s representation in the arts, and the preservation of the legacy of Intentional Creativity?
Museums have been notoriously curated and funded by those of affluence and power but framed as ‘for the people’ – which means the people will see what the museum curators value. But who are the curators, the investors, the founders? Are they people we would have to tea? Discuss God or politics with? Do they share an ideal with the artists, or do they dominate the story? And for how long will it be okay not to represent the marginalized voices and images of women and people of color? It is no longer okay and never has been. The Civil rights uprising is calling museums powerfully to this task of equality and justice, and most of them have already been in years of bureaucratic red tape to make this change – and are making it now.
Museum culture is leading the way at the forefront of change and we are emerging alongside the call to a greater context for representing the human experience as more than just white male artists creating their view of the world and how it includes women and people of color within a limited or diminished scope.
“Diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion in all aspects of museum structure and programming are vital to the future viability, relevance, and sustainability of museums”. ~ American Alliance of Museums (we are members here and attended the conference online last year)
We are a living museum for art, artist-run, with shows curated by artists. Our focus is women in the arts, with an emphasis on intentional and intuitive creations.
“Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Along with its corollaries of freedom of information and press freedom, freedom of expression serves as an enabler of all other rights.”
~ United Nations UNESCO
