Being About It!

What if your life were a canvas and your experience are the strokes and marks that create the masterpiece of you?

What if every loss becomes a prayer dot, every tear is added as a blessing, every challenge and celebration becomes a layer that informs who you are becoming?

As the creator you get to choose how you capture, arrange each element of your life as well as the form in which it will be expressed. As time goes on you look back and realize that you have an exhibit of beautiful and not so beautiful stories in front of you. They are displayed in the way you move and show up in the world.

What does that look like for you?

Why “Being About It”? I’ll tell you…

My creative journey started out of sheer survival and from a place of creating to live. From creating jewelry out of cardboard and magazine pages to feed my family as a single mother, attending festivals to pay for a dream trip to Ireland, quitting my corporate job because my heart wasn’t in it and it wasn’t what I was about. All I wanted to do was to create, and anyone who is an artist know how challenging it is.

Over the years my Beloved husband listened to me talk about my dreams of being a full time artist and wanting to truly live a creative life and my dreams and ideas about my art business being self-sustaining. Sometimes I would struggle with all that was required of me to pull this big transformation off. I would say to my hubby, “I am not asking for permission, I am asking for support”, his response was always “Don’t talk about it, be about it”!

I took that to heart. It was motivational. It was the truth! Every artist has to BE about it – and by ‘it’ I mean their art, their creativity, their self expression! That is the place where the magic comes from!

Being About It is NOT about exhibiting talent, prestige, training, skill, or experience as an Artist by the collective’s definition.

Being About it is…embracing creativity as a daily spiritual practice and knowing that even when I miss the mark, that too is part of the journey.

Being About It is … learning self-compassion by authoring my own definition for what my art should or shouldn’t be , but what it is.

Being About it is… It is to me about exhibiting my beingness and experiences as context for a body of work that expresses my creative journey, identity, and choice to bare the matter of me through my creative expressions in the context of my life as an organic, textured, imperfect, and evolving human experience, no matter the form that expression takes.

This exhibit is not only a personal challenge to BE ABOUT IT and show up anyway, but is an invitation for others to see art as a living representation of its creator.

My hope is that this exhibit will inspire, impress, and impact others to bring awareness to what they are BE-ing About and how they exhibit what they are being called to cause and create in the world.

~ Milagros Suriano-Rivera

Milagros Suriano-Rivera - Multimedia Artist and Intentional Creativity Teacher

Milagros Suriano-Rivera is a mixed media artist, Color of Woman Intentional Creativity® Teacher, Musea Co-curator, and the Vice President of Programing for the Intentional Creativity Foundation, the not-for-profit which funds the Intentional Creativity Museum. She has become a beloved presence and ambassador for Intentional Creativity as Host of the #CreativeConversations series.

A multimedia artist for most of her life, Milagros creates in paint, mixed-media, paper clay, and paper jewelry. Realizing that her corporate job was not serving her or the dream of becoming a working artist, Milagros made the conscious choice to join Musea Museum for Intentional Creativity as a consultant. Since then, she has been showing up in true authenticity, holding space, witnessing, leading community circles, supporting our student body, as well as being a voice of inspiration for our BIWOC community.

Milagros is a wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, sister, and a creative catalyst for healing. She embraces the Intentional Creativity® methodology and integrates it’s teachings into her everyday life has by using her hands to move brush, create imaginary screens and portals that she co-creating with the Universe…to bring the life that she’s dared to imagine into form.

This way of BE-ing allows her to authentically hold space with and for the community while healing her personal story around her identity as a woman of color. She loves collaborating with the universe and creating medicine through creative acts. Whether she is painting, sculpting, rolling paper beads, leading circles, or witnessing our beautiful community, she knows these are all acts of Love! Creativity literally fed her and her family and she came to truly understand the meaning of “a slack hand causes poverty meant, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.” Proverbs 10:4.

My art is influenced by many talented artists; however, it wasn’t until I found the teachings of Shiloh Sophia McCloud regarding the use of creativity and intention to catalyze and awaken oneself that I realized that my creative voice matters. When I reflect on my creative journey in the context of my life, I know that creativity is about embracing my shadow, creating my own light, and the ability to dance between the worlds so that I may create a potential for healing for myself and others. My hope is to inspire and impact others so that they can reclaim their personal power and self expression through creativity. That is what I am here to cause and create.

If ‘To Be or Not To Be? is the question, then Intentional Creativity is the CHOICE that gives you access to the answer

Thank you for witnessing the exhibit.
We invite you to leave your comments and reflections below!

Exhibit Page Design and Concept

Amber Gould, Curatorial Director
Sumaiyah Wysdom Yates, Lead Exhibit Technologist and Designer

Kelly Bonsall, Design CoCurator
Milagros Suriano-Rivera, Design CoCurator
Jessica Richmond, Design CoCurator

Exhibit Virtual Presentation

Sumaiyah Wysdom Yates, Lead Exhibit Technologist and Designer

Collaborative Curation

Shiloh Sophia, Curator

Promotion and Communications

Maia Lemann, Sarah Mardell and Amber Gould

We as a community strive to be intentional in our relationship with life, to honor the flora, the fauna, the fungi, the water, the air, the minerals, stories, cultures, traditions and sacred places of the Many Lands in which we find our sense of place and practice Intentional Creativity. We acknowledge with humility and gratitude our interconnection, our place in the cycle, and our sacred responsibility of reciprocation, love, and respect towards our precious and beautiful home, the Earth and all beings.

Make A Donation Today

The Intentional Creativity® Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. We are a self-funded Foundation, which means that your donations and our Museum Membership is what allows the Foundation to host Museum Exhibits, steward the MUSEA Museum + permanent collection, employ women - all graduates of MUSEA's certification programs - to run the day-to-day business of the ICF, offer grants to artists to assist them in creating and sharing Intentional Creativity workshops, offer Arts Activism events and programming, along with other programming and more. Without you, none of this would be possible. Thank you for your generosity and support!

If you enjoyed this Exhibit, please consider making a donation so that we can continue to bring underrepresented art and artists to the forefront. Thank you.

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