December 2024 Culture Care Newsletter

Support Culture Care This December

Help us raise funds for IAMCultureCare’s efforts. While IAMCC’s founder Makoto Fujimura and its board serve as volunteers for the Culture Care movement, operating an organization is not cost-free. IAMCultureCare is a registered 501c(3) non-profit organization that relies 100% on our community’s support. This year, our 2024 end-of-year goal is $35,000. These funds will allow us to continue our Culture Care movement.

If you have been encouraged by the message of Culture Care and our initiatives over the years, please consider supporting IAMCultureCare this December. Visit our website to donate online or to learn about alternative ways to give. Your gift of any size is welcome!

A Note from IAMCultureCare

I vividly remember the moment in April, 2019 that I saw the cathedral of Notre Dame burn. I had almost finished my freshman year of college and was studying with some peers when in a moment of distraction I perused social media. ​“Guys, Notre Dame is on fire”, I recall saying, the reality not fully sinking in at first. We crowded around my laptop and watched as the spire, engulfed in flames, finally fell to the ground below. Paris — and the world—looked on in horror.

It felt apocalyptic. Now, looking back five years later, it was merely a harbinger of further chaos to come. A global pandemic, increased cultural polarization, political unrest (including successful and attempted assassinations), climate disasters, large-scale outbreaks of violence, threats to democracy and the ideals that Notre Dame was built a testament to — name a potentially culture-shaping destructive event and 2019 – 2024 has witnessed it.

And yet the past five years have also been a time of quiet, caring work. Masons, sculptors, carpenters, stained glass glaziers, organ builders, painters — over 1000 artisans and craftspeople from 250 firms (many of them small family businesses with generations of acquired knowledge) have lovingly restored the cathedral building where possible, and where not, have rebuilt using centuries-old traditional methods which match the original building materials and tools exactly. To replace the 13^th-century oak roof beams, for example, similar trees were hand-selected and cut down using built-for-purpose replica axes before being transported via the River Seine to the building site in the heart of Paris. Notre Dame has been remade in an extravagant act of love for a cultural landmark. What a #postdestruction Culture Care response, especially amid a remarkably fraught time in French politics and culture!

What I find most startling however, is not that the building has been materially restored to its pre-fire state, but rather how the restoration process has revealed, almost by accident, something of the character of the building that had been lost. Restorers did not only wipe away soot from the stained glass and altarpiece artwork; they also carefully removed centuries of wear, dust, and grime that had darkened the stonework and art. If this restoration of Notre Dame has any art-historical lessons for us, one would be that our perception of gothic architecture is often inaccurate. This is not a world of a gloomy, looming atmosphere, but rather one of technicolor luminosity. And insofar as architecture is a reflection of a culture’s values, Notre Dame’s restoration reveals too a luminosity and vibrancy of the medieval soul — individual and cultural — that built these vast monuments.

Rather than the macabre drama of Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (or Disney’s, for that matter), an accurate account of the 13^th-century cathedral community would include the incredibly innovative composers of the Notre-Dame school of polyphony, whose work we too know as if by the accident of history. A student at the time (known only by his manuscript number, ​“Anonymous IV”) identifies two musicians, Léonin and Pérotin, as the authors of some of our earliest surviving musical manuscripts. Their music incorporated four distinct musical lines which weaved in and out of each other in polyphony so progressively extravagant it was criticized at the time. Even more significantly, though, the Notre-Dame composers created an organized system of rhythm and rhythmic notation, enabling sound to be transmitted accurately via visual media for the first time in western music. And, like the cathedral setting it was written in, this music is not only historically important but also startlingly alive and vibrant. Take a listen to Master Pérotin’s Viderunt Omnes as an example of this aural luminosity. In some ways it sounds more like Philip Glass or John Adams than our mental stereotype of 12^th- and 13^th-century music.

I see the Notre Dame restoration as doing something similar to the progressive Notre-Dame school’s notation system that enabled the preservation of this music. The restoration too, has not been without controversy or criticism. But the work of the past five years has sought to refresh the lightness and vibrancy of the architecture and art for us, as it would have appeared to its original audience, and France’s Culture Care response to the fire is worth celebrating and considering as a model for our own cultural infernos. And of course, this is neither the first fire the church has faced nor likely the last. Yet as Makoto Fujimura reminds us below, when fire does burn, it is not only destructive. It also refines. I was reminded recently that the original name for the final book of the New Testament was the ​“Apocalypse” of John (rather than the ​“Revelation”). Culture Care embraces the apocalypse precisely because it is an opportunity for refining — and in that, a revelation of our cultural soul.

Jacob Beaird, Editor

A Note from Makoto Fujimura, Founder of IAMCultureCare

Jesus sent his followers ​“two by two” (Luke 10:1) to begin their journey as ambassadors of the hope of the gospel. Our Culture Care journey is also one not to be taken alone. The overwhelming narrative of our age is driven by fear and anxiety, not by love and care. We are told by many that our work as artists is impossible, impractical, or even transgressive to normative values. And even for those who are ​“Creative Catalysts” (who may not be ​“artists” themselves, but who passionately advocate for the arts), it is an uphill battle to not shrink back but instead to stick one’s neck (and funding) out to help without any guarantee of ROI (return on investment) or similar metrics. In such a journey, we need each other. That impetus was the beginning of the Culture Care movement. By creating friendships and communities that could withstand the harsh winds of Culture Wars we are enabled to meander, two-by-two, as border-stalkers into an overwhelming darkness full of wolves hungry for power and influence. 

When I recently received a book by a fellow sojourner, Bruce Herman, about his many years of journeying as an artist, a teacher, and as a friend, I read again what he had written in epistolary form (he wrote three letters to me in the darkest time of my life, which he modified for this book), and immediately thought of the above scripture passage. In Bruce’s book, Makers by Nature: Letters from a Master Painter on Faith, Hope and Art, what is implicit and explicit throughout is this journey into his creativity and imagination in ​“two by two” form, rather than seeing art merely as self-expression, done alone in his studio in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Bruce, of all artists, knows about the heroic assumptions of the modern artist toward that stoic, lone-wolf self-expressionism. Trained by none other than Philip Guston, the iconic mythical figure of modern art, in Boston University’s M.F.A. program, he journeyed into Christian faith unexpectedly after years of meandering in eastern mysticism. He was hired at Gordon College in 1984 as a lone adjunct, and in a few short years had established a thriving art department, collection, major and eventually a beautiful Center for the Arts with studios and a museum-level gallery.

I first heard of Bruce at a conference of Christians in Visual Arts (CIVA, sadly no longer in existence) in which the conference leader asked for prayer for Bruce. His house — and a studio full of his art — had burned down, and he lost all his possessions. I write about ​“meeting’ Bruce this way in my book, Art+Faith: A Theology of Making. Here’s how I described finally meeting him after years of praying for an artist who lost all his works:

I spoke to Bruce about his fire of destruction the first time we met, in the later 1990’s, many years after I uttered that prayer at the conference. He told me, with a grin full of confidence, ​“That fire was the best thing that happened to me and my art.”

What? If this man isn’t crazy, then how did he get there?

Thus, our sojourn began. We embarked on a project called QU4RTETS, collaborating to imaginatively encounter T.S. Eliot’s seminal poem Four Quartets through our visual art. Eliot’s masterpiece (his ​“epitaph” of a poem) gave Bruce a vision for fire that sanctifies rather than a fire of destruction, and I learned — especially after becoming an unwitting ​“survivor” of 9/11/01 in New York City — that I desperately needed that vision.

Bruce’s book is made up of encouraging letters to those who meander, who journey into the mysteries of faith and art. It is a gift to our Culture Care movement for artists and creative catalysts. I cannot recommend it highly enough. This will be an ideal book to read together for your Culture Care groups, or to simply start to journey ​“two by two” into the winds of culture today by reading this book together. More to come here in our newsletter, and I have also started a Substack page (benefitting IAMCultureCare) with additional resources for your journey. Bruce and I are hoping to exhibit our entire suite of QU4RTETS works in the fall of next year at Gordon College, so look forward to seeing this sojourn continue with more details to come.

Culture Care Events

• Beauty & Justice Lecture Series and Exhibit — Philadelphia, PA, 2024 – 2025. Makoto 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 final two lectures will occur on February 11 and March 7, with an exhibition of Mako Fujimura’s works in March/April 2025. RSVP here for the upcoming events.
• Windrider Summit—Park City, UT, Jan 26 – 31. Join the Windrider Institute at the Sundance Film Festival.

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

• A neurological study suggests that viewing original art in person activates the brain 10 times more than looking at a reproduction.
• As a musician, the holiday season is usually a time of work rather than respite. One exception I take time for each year is listening to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols service from King’s College, Cambridge, broadcast in the US on Dec 24^th morning.
• IAMCC partner Embers International has officially launched three new volunteer programs.
• How children teach us to pay attention, from Plough.
• Music recs, December edition — two very different but equally good recordings of Handel’s Messiah: VOCES8, Apollo5, and the Academy of Ancient Music have a beautifully tender live recording (possibly the most moving version of the work I’ve ever heard); and John Nelson conducts the English Concert (including some alternative, ​“Appendix” versions of well-known movements) in a monumental but impressively clean version.

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 does 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.