A Message from Our Curator, Shiloh Sophia

Shiloh Sophia in Sonoma Park

Sapienta - Shiloh's Legend Painting, 2021

I never could have imagined what would happen when, in 2008, I shifted my focus from selling paintings to teaching other women how to make paintings. How to make paintings of their own, of themselves, of their families, of them breastfeeding babies, with lovers and friends, in nature, in the ocean, with plants and animals and minerals, fantastical, legendary images of themselves, as if it was possible to take a cosmic photo of someone in the most sacred moment of their lives. That moment, that's what these paintings are.

Archetypal timeless energies, revealing themselves through the brush and then the pen of each woman.

When I first received my assignment, my sacred assignment at 24, it was very clear to me that one of the things I was to do was to change the way that the feminine was related to in image in my lifetime.

This call was crystal clear.

What was not clear was how was I going to do that - like it couldn't conceive of it. It was 1994. What did I know about getting an image out? I wouldn't have a website until 1999. Google and searches wouldn't be what they are today.

I had a few books that shared the divine feminine, a few books that featured women, but images of women at the time were largely based in pre-Rafaelite or fashionable, vogue, iconic beauty. There was very little to be found at the time, so I could not conceive of how would these images of the feminine be changed?

I'd only just begun to paint.

One day I imagined a billboard with an image of the feminine that when people saw it when they drove by, they would be quickened, they would be changed by seeing it. Then, when I began to teach it, it started to become more clear: Oh, not just my images - many images. Oh, I get it now.

Not just one woman, 10,000 women. Not just 10,000 women, 20 or 30,000 paintings.

For an 18-year cycle, it's been an astonishing experience to witness the paintings that arrive, that I've been able to be a part of guiding And so in some cases the paintings have similarities to mine, because I was up painting to teach people to be painters. I was teaching people to receive insight from the earth and the cosmos, and from their
inner world.

It wasn't about a style.

It isn't even my style.

It was about how do you reverse engineer a painting, so that someone who's not a painter with classical skills can do it.
That's what it was.

We broke it down step by step into 13 steps, and then if a woman chose to go on from there, making it completely, completely original in her own, leaving behind the pattern used to build it, then she did.

Not everyone chose to do that.

Of course there are moments of concern that I have that there's a similarity between some of the images, but the cult of constant originality and innovation also has its drawbacks. We're a family of painters.

Throughout time there's been schools of painting, and when people studied there, their paintings had similarities to the people that they studied with. Those who chose to, went on and became painters with a capital P, that's their choice.
It wasn't teaching people to be painters with a capital P. It was actually teaching them to access their own inner world, and then when we began to teach people to teach others, then that too was not about painting with a capital P, meaning classical, great paintings of the world.

No, this was about the inner images of the feminine, and giving women access to give other people access to those inner images for themselves. A building process, layer by layer, that was also included with intentionality, each
layer having a cognitive focus that increases consciousness.

I'll never forget the day that my mom Caron, my mother who co-parented me with my mom, Sue, the art matriarch, and Mary McDonald and I sat down at the feast table of love - a table that Sue built for me in 1999 - and reverse engineered the painting process, resulting in the 13 steps which would lend itself to Legend, and eventually to the Color of Woman Intentional Creativity Teacher Training.

I could never have imagined what would happen now.

I am overjoyed and feel I have fulfilled my sacred assignment through this work.
I am so grateful to the lineage of intentional creativity and to all of you for caring and for carrying on the work.

Work is our theme for this show.

"She is a Piece of Work" is often used as a derogatory or satirical way of talking about a woman who's just too dang much, too big for her own britches, takes up just too much space. She's a wide load coming through. She's got too many flowers in her hair and her feathers and her laces and her leathers are flying. She's a bird on her shoulder. There's a jaguar at her side. She speaks the language of plants, of animals, of the elements.

She is creation creating itself through her.

She is a piece of work indeed, but this theme of work has other connotations in our community because my mother Caron and my grandmother Eden and Sue and my aunt Janet all taught me
to love, to labor, to work. That work was one of the most beautiful things that a woman could do.

Not work like 9-to-5 kind of work, although that could be included, but more like my work.

Here at MUSEA Center for Intentional Creativity - where our incredible Museum through the Intentional
Creativity Foundation 501(c)3, under the leadership of Naa Kwarley Amissah, our Executive Director - we bring forward the work of women. We love to labor towards this work. We mean work like each person's work, the work that comes from within her, that is hers to cause and to create, which is the quintessential question of Intentional Creativity.

What is yours to cause and to create?

But there's another reference to work that I desire to share... In around 2000, I was going to a spiritualist church for one day and it was said that you could bring a question for someone who'd crossed over the veil of the other side. So I called Sue Hoya Sellars and I asked her, "Hey, if you could speak to Lenore Thomas Strauss,
your art matriarch, your legal guardian, your art teacher, like you are mine, what would you say to her or what would you ask of her?" And she said, "I would want her to know, I'm doing the work, I'm doing my work."

And so with this exhibit, to all of creation we say, We are doing our work.

In 2008, Curate Shiloh Sophia opened the gateway to a new era of art as ritual, story, and transformation with the first-ever Legend Course.

In 2010, she lit the lantern for Color of Woman Training, a sacred path of Intentional Creativity® Teacher Training.

Now, in 2025, we arrive at a powerful moment of completion.

Curate Shiloh Sophia will lead these beloved courses, Legend and Color of Woman, for the very last time.

And we invite you to be part of this historic farewell, and celebration.

It will be epic.
A culmination.
A legacy made visible.
A ceremony of color, courage, and creativity.

Over 500 women have walked the path of Legend and more than 700 have answered the call of Color of Woman. Many have returned year after year, because the work is that deep, that healing, that alive.

This is our moment to honor the women, their art, and the transformational offerings that have changed thousands of lives around the globe.

Come celebrate with us.