So much talent in their youthful exuberance walked in another direction, out of the necessity for survival. To those who stayed in the game despite the conditions, you pioneer on the frontier of unyielding creative imaginations.

• We need your visions to give life to our mundane worlds and possibilities beyond our wildest dreams.
• We need your visions to breadth air from to the suffocating exhaustion.
• We need your visions to context the symbols and words we use each day in trying to express our own identities.
• We need your visions to laugh, to cry, to feel a sense of belonging.

Thank you for staying the course against waves of insecurity, poverty, and fear, which in your endurance to survive, you arrived at the other-side, and privileged your imagination to pour onto the page, canvas or stage.

As your audience, your endurance creates opportunities for us, however brief, to shed our self-centeredness; strip away the contrived thoughts as we take in the raw emotionalism you put before us.

As your audience, while examining your work, our emotional life journeys through an array of fears that question identity; that feed obsessions, sometimes grandiose, sometimes of uselessness, but in the end, experiencing joy in witnessing a new form of understanding.

As your audience, the painting, sculpture, book, poem, play or film catapult us, if we let it, to find ourselves on a frontier of believing in something better.

As your audience, we transit outside of ourselves, and in that instant place of reflection, we somehow, magically walk taller, more assured, and with greater meaning in the obsession for our security.

As your audience, we give to you, our contributions, to keep this world afloat.

The selfishness of our nation of states, in its quest for power, greed and promiscuous consumption, seeks to kill, to silence, the images artists reflect of our world by starving them of sustenance. Your messages become our messages to ourselves, to face truths we turn away from. The more truthful they are, the more they threaten the liars, cheaters or thieves those who revel in the conspicuous consumption of lust and exploitation.

Stay the course. Believe in your third eye. Believe in your process of bringing enduring creative images or dialogues from within to us. Believe in love. Believe in higher beings. Altruism is not dead. It lives in your enduring eyes.