After graduating from the Royal College of Art in London and returning to America, I became disillusioned with the American and European art world. This feeling was in part due to my growing respect for the aliveness, emotion, and passionate engagement with both content and materials that I saw in Latino, African-American, and outsider artists, such as Pepon Osorio, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Juan Sanchez, Alison Saar, and William Hawkins. Many others were at the fringes of the art world, all but invisible to museum curators. The mainstream Euro-American tradition seemed to be bereft of freshness, spontaneity, and urgency. By comparison, the Western artistic tradition lacked emotional depth. As someone working in that tradition, teaching art as well as working collaboratively with children eventually resolved my dilemma.