5 Quotes by Makoto Fujimura

When we cross borders culturally, we experience some alienation from our own culture and gain an objective perspective toward our own culture at the same time. A bicultural individual comes to identify home as a culture outside his or her original identity, and may vacillate in commitment and loyalty to both cultures.

Effective stewardship leads to generative work and a generative culture. We turn wheat into bread – and bread into community. We turn grapes into wine – and wine into occasions for joyful camaraderie, conviviality, conversation, and creativity. We turn minerals into paints – and paints into works that lift the heart or stir the spirit. We turn ideas and experiences into imaginative worlds for sheer enjoyment and to expand the scope of our empathy.

Art reveals the power of the intuitive, capturing the reality hiding beneath the culture. The.

According to Flaubert, the artist inhabits his or her work as God does: present everywhere, but visible nowhere.

Where does this openness to the “other” come from in artists? Some may grow out of empathy earned because artists are themselves often exiled from a normative tribal identity. There is also training to extend that empathy. In art, we constantly train ourselves to inhabit or portray the “other.” Artists learn to be adaptable and blend into an environment while not belonging to it, which also requires learning to speak new tribal languages.