I'm so proud to be with an institution that questions and continuously questions itself. For a while, when I first came to Chicago, there—majority was 40 percent of people living in Chicago were of minority status and were black. Right now in Chicago public schools, I think it's like 70 percent of Chicago Public Schools are Latino and black. These are our future generations, right?

If we don't make an effort to engage them in the full gradient of education—which includes the fine arts which have largely been taken out of a lot of public schooling—then I think we're doing them an incredible disservice, but we're also doing ourselves an incredible disservice. You can't not give access to aesthetics and to this bigger picture, out-of-the-box dreaming and then wonder why later these generations haven't come up with future solutions for these problems that we're gonna have to figure out. This work that we do now will have a direct affect in how our future happens.