How can the aesthetic experience be known sufficiently to allow the intensity of perception and emotional courage that often accompany it at its most profound to clarify and deepen our relationship with one another? How can that quality of awareness and mind that can be developed through the making and experiencing of art inform everyday life? How can the astounding and dynamic interconnectedness of the creative process give artists and their audiences a surer sense of place, both within themselves and in their multiple worlds? These are aesthetic questions, political questions, ecological questions, questions which artists and the people who believe in them need to feel at home.                                                      
                                                                                             -Michael Brenson

To be a maker is to be a participant. It is not just to take hand to material. Making is more than the physical labor. It is careful observation, precise thinking, "looking for the underlying form," Pirsig called it.                                      

                                                 - Mary Jane Jacobs, Dewey for Artists, 2018