At the Bunting she's exposed to human diversity and to questions of politics, race, and gender which lead to intellectual conversations that enrich her work. She's found a very stimulating environment. You said the role of art should be much more central. I was talking about rather deep cultural paradigms that work for or against art. For example, in my own childhood culture in Japan, art so permeates the society that it's not thought of as a separate thing that people do or that only specialists do.
Every child is taught calligraphy.
Even just a generally educated person has had some sort of training in drawing and calligraphy, or perhaps pottery, and women are trained in flower arranging or music. Forms of art and the capacity to do them are understood to be part of how one is a human being. I was with a friend in Japan last December, just before Christmas, and we walked down a normal street on our way to a train station. It was trash day in this regular neighborhood in Japan. My friend was taken aback because everybody's little bags of trash for pickup were extremely neatly arranged, lined up out on the street for the truck.