“Culture Care begins with a counter-intuitive premise: that abundance, not scarcity, is the proper posture of the cultural worker. That the maker’s task is not to produce for a market but to tend — to cultivate, to care for, the commons of human meaning.”
– Makoto Fujimura
“Here is the paradox I have lived with for many years: the work belongs neither fully to the artist nor fully to the audience. It exists between them. A painting waits for the viewer. A sonata waits for the listener. A poem waits for the reader who has not yet been born. In that waiting, the work acquires something like agency. It speaks differently to each person who approaches it with care, saying things the artist did not know she had said, meeting needs she could not have anticipated.”
– Makoto Fujimura
“Justice itself requires the imagination of abundance — the conviction that another person’s flourishing does not diminish yours. The artist who stewards her imagination faithfully is, in this sense, a justice worker. She makes space for the kind of beholding that justice requires.”
– Makoto Fujimura
“Why art in such dark and troublesome times? Why art when the world is stricken of joy, with so many in despair?”
– Makoto Fujimura
“We often imagine giving as subtraction, as erosion of self, silence as weakness. But kenosis is life-giving and as powerful as presence: the pouring out that makes possible the flourishing of the other. The space we relinquish is not abandoned; it is offered. It becomes a form of hospitality.”
– Makoto Fujimura
“The question before us is not only: ‘How do I do my work well?’, but also: ‘What, exactly, has been entrusted to me to care for?”‘That is where Culture Care begins.”
– Makoto Fujimura
“The act of making in the Advent season is itself waiting for the apocalypse — not the end of the world, but its unveiling.”
– Makoto Fujimura
Practicing Resurrection
