April 2025 Culture Care Newsletter

Heading image: Hannah Borger Overbeck (American, 1870 – 1931), Poet’s Narcissus, c. 1915, watercolor on paper. Public Domain.

A Note from IAMCultureCare

I write this April newsletter looking out on a once-again green world. There’s an edenic rightness to these first weeks of spring, when the earth is sodden with potential, a promise of something not yet revealed but nevertheless inevitable: life seems to simply want to sprout forth. With a little tending, a little weeding, a little care, by late May a garden brings forth beauty beyond the gardener’s imagination or intent.

I once came across a post online that I’m reminded of now. Hike through the forests of the eastern United States in the springtime, the author noted, and you’ll stumble across clumps of daffodils far from any signs of civilization. The weird thing is, these sprightly flowers are not native here. Their presence indicates former (European) settlement. Look closer and you can usually find ruined cellars, gravestones, or wells nearby. But these flowers are also highly toxic, and thus couldn’t have been planted for medicinal or culinary purposes. Instead, they are a forgotten testament to beauty for its own sake, ​“a crowd, a host of golden daffodils” bringing a homely abundance to an otherwise scarce existence.

These daffodils exist on the border between the wild and the civilized. In a strict sense, they are not ​“natural” — they have been selectively bred for centuries, and as mentioned are not native in the US. But they are also too simple, too hardy and down-to-earth to be horticultural tokens of empire. Indeed, they more commonly grace cottage borders than formal palace gardens. Not wild, not civilized, what they are is cultivated; and, unlike the ruined settlements they once adorned, these flowers still thrive.

This is a philosophical and spiritual curiosity as much as it is ecological or historical. For all its grandeur and comfortable convenience, civilization places the wild world at arms length. It denigrates the other — uncivilized, barbaric — and forces change upon it. Conversely, to cultivate is to care for, to tend, to give attention to. We speak of cultivating a garden, a friendship, or a virtuous habit. Rather than denigrating, the cultivator recognizes in the other a potential good rather than a threat: a bare plot or a stranger invite relationship. As with all generative relationships, though, cultivation requires hard work and willingness to be transformed. We must submit to the life and constraints of the garden, the friendship, or virtue for the fullest expression of reality to be revealed. Beauty is bigger on the inside.

Culture, of course, is a direct result of cultivation both etymologically and anthropologically. It comes from the Latin for ​‘cultivation’—colere—and we can see too the link between our early ancestors’ adoption of agriculture and the development of human culture. Insofar as a thriving culture is a cultivated one, there is a lesson to be learned from the border-stalking daffodils for our work today. Rather than the false binary of surrendering to a moral and spiritual wilderness on the one hand, or engaging in culture wars to forcefully win back a dying civilization on the other, perhaps Culture Care is to seek a third option: cultivation. Civilizations rise and fall, but in their ruins the daffodils grow—early harbingers of generative life to come.

Jacob Beaird, Editor

A Note from Makoto Fujimura, Founder of IAMCultureCare

Dear Culture Gardeners,

I knelt, fingers buried in soil still hardened by the cold. I was planting gladiolus bulbs — those onion-like promises that, come midsummer, will rise and bloom with resplendent color.

This has been my Lenten practice: to plant bulbs, to bury future emanations into the dark soil, trusting they will not be hidden there for long (or be moved by busy squirrels), but rather ​“transfigured”. In fact, they will be transfigured twice, once into flowers, and then into my own paintings. That is my culture care hope. The bulbs, now silent, will speak a language the world (as Jacob notes in his essay) has nearly forgotten. It waits in darkness. It trusts in the unseen.

That same movement — from darkness into light — finds resonance in another offering this spring: my Transfiguration exhibit, now open at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. This exhibit, born out of years of prayer and century-old Sumi ink, invites viewers into the luminous tension between suffering and glory, between the veiled and the revealed. It stands as a visual liturgy that echoes Christ’s own journey toward the mountain, toward radiance in a public space. But it also echoes, for those who do not share our Christian journey, another form of ​“transfiguration”: that of nature and that of art. I will speak about that in my artist talk this coming Monday.

This season also brought with it the grace of community. Haejin and I had the honor of speaking together at both the Missio Alliance Awakenings Gathering and Leaders Like Us Global Summit. These spaces — rich with lament, vision, and sacred resistance — felt like upper rooms, places where the Spirit breathes on artists, pastors, activists, and leaders weary of utilitarianism and ready to reimagine with tenderness. We spoke not just of art but of reweaving — of lives and callings, of justice and mercy — and how beauty, when trusted, can be a balm and a blueprint in tension filled times.

Also, I write to you with a sense of both completion and expectancy. Two manuscripts, years in the tending, have been handed in:

Art Is: A Journey into the Light (Yale University Press, releasing this November) explores art not as commodity or statement, but as pilgrimage. It is an attempt to illuminate the quiet spaces where light breaks through: in silence, in color, in the slow work of seeing.

The second, Beauty x Justice: Creating a Life of Abundance and Courage (co-written with Haejin and releasing in spring 2026 with Brazos Press), asks what happens when beauty and justice are no longer held apart — what the author Elaine Scarry notes that a single word, ​“fair”, signifies. A ​“fair” world fulfills both the yearning for equity that Haejin (an attorney) brings into the world, and our love for beauty that I have invested in and written about as the common, shared breath of hope for this dark world. Writing this book together has been a vision for our prayers and the literary manifestation of our marriage.

These projects, like the bulbs resting beneath the soil, are now entrusted to time. I hold them loosely, knowing the Spirit’s wind will determine their blooming.

As we move toward Easter, I offer you this invitation: plant something. Not only in the earth, but in your time, your attention, your words. Plant what the world cannot yet see. Plant in hope.

Yours for Culture Care, 

Mako Fujimura

Guest Poetry Feature: Chelsea Fraser

Throughout my life, poetry has been a channel for spiritual communication. As a teenager, I was high achieving, and John Milton’s Sonnet 19 ​“On His Blindness” particularly served me. The final line has been a gentle battering ram on my often-harried mind and soul: ​“They also serve who only stand and wait.” Milton’s sonnet continues to remind me that God’s work is not dependent on my own, and that just being his is indeed my chief end. 

I experienced a call to write only after long drought, three complicated pregnancies and deliveries, and a shifting personal landscape; and God kept showing me trees. They too stand and wait. They serve by being. They cultivate life and perform their work thanklessly and faithfully. Recently, I have felt a new call to share my poetry. My debut poetry collection, The Mother Tree (to be released April 25, 2025), is in many ways an outflow of what God began in my heart all those years ago through other people’s faithfulness to share their poetry. I pray that the growth that God has done and continues to do in me will bear fruit of its own in my community and beyond.

Chelsea Fraser is a writer and arts administrator from South Carolina who has been published in Ekstasis Magazine, The Dewdrop, Vessels of Light, Persephone Literary Magazine, The Way Back to Ourselves Literary Journal, and has been a featured poet at Christianity Today’s Inkwell arts events. Her debut poetry collection, The Mother Tree, is published by vine & shoots on April 25.

“Large”, ​“Ars Poetica”, and ​“Evensong” copyright © Chelsea Fraser

Culture Care Events & Announcements

• Beauty & Justice Lecture and Exhibit Opening Reception—Philadelphia, PA, April 7. Mako and Haejin Shim Fujimura selected as University of Pennsylvania’s Office of Social Equity & Community’s Equity in Action Visiting Scholars for the 2024 – 25 academic year, presenting lectures on the topic of​“Beauty+Justice”. The exhibition of Mako’s monumental​Transfiguration triptych runs now-June 1, 2025 at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.
• Embers International Artist Advocate Gathering — London, UK, May ¹⁰⁄₁₁. IAMCC’s partner organization Embers International will have a meeting with its UK community of Artist Advocates on the weekend of May 10 – 11. Embers’ Artist Advocate Counsel Mako Fujimura will lead along with Embers’ CEO Haejin Fujimura. If you are an artist based in the UK that’s interested in beauty and justice work and would like to receive an invitation to the gathering, learn more and apply for the Artist Advocate program here.
• Goldenwood Institute Fallow Retreat—Cambridge, UK, May 13–16. Goldenwood staff, board, and deans (including Mako and Haejin Fujimura) lead the annual Fallow retreat in Cambridge.

Do you have a news item or upcoming culture care event? Consider sharing it with us for a possible feature here in the newsletter! Email jacob@​internationalartsmovement.​org.

Web Links

• March Belonging Conversation from Mako Fujimura and Julia Hendrickson.
• Also Mako, on ​“Jesus Wept.”
• Christian Wiman interviewed on ​“The Work of the Poet”, in Plough and excerpted in our newsletter heading.
• A sixteenth-century book of botanical art.
• Ted Gioia lists FASCINATING present-day examples of political/protest music.
• New music recs: first-ever recording of rediscovered music for flute by the French baroque composer Marin Marais; Blake Morgan arranges for VOCES8; and North Carolina fiddle and banjo music out soon from Rhiannon Giddens.
• Beautiful wood engravings by Clare Leighton.
• The Hedgehog Review reflects on the moral complexity of Flannery O’Conner, now 100.
• On reading T.S. Eliot through ​“The Waste Land”.
• James MacMillan’s Seven Last Words makes for a devastating Good Friday listen.

IAMCultureCare is a registered 501c(3) non-profit organization that relies on your support to continue our Culture Care efforts of amending the soil of culture as an antidote to toxic culture wars. This newsletter and our other programming do that effectively, and we welcome gifts of any size to continue these efforts. You can donate here or get in touch with us about corporate sponsorship!

All content in this newsletter belongs to the respective creators, as noted, and is used with permission. If you would like to submit something for consideration in a future newsletter issue, you may do so by filling out this form or by emailing jacob@​internationalartsmovement.​org.