Into the Silence | Winter Into Spring
Makoto Fujimura and Bruce Herman
August 27—October 15, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 6, 4–6 p.m.
History of the Collaboration
In 2009, painters Makoto Fujimura and Bruce Herman began a collaboration inspired by T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, initiated by scholar and collector Dr. G. Walter Hansen. The project grew into an international exhibition and concert tour with theologian Dr. Jeremy Begbie and composer Christopher Theofanidis, visiting major venues worldwide. A companion book and limited-edition lithographs were produced, with ongoing educational materials extending the project’s impact.
This new exhibition highlights recent work by Fujimura, moving beyond his prior work (before QU4RTETS), entering into deepening visual silence. Being a consultant on Martin Scorsese’s film based upon Shusaku Endo’s book Silence (see Fujimura's book Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith born of Suffering, IVPress, 2017), combined with his desire to create contemplative space for a hurting world, has motivated Fujimura’s magnificent new paintings. Herman, too, has moved in new directions since their original collaboration–paintings more directly involved in our current cultural distress—but that work is for another exhibit. Into Silence | Winter into Spring is meant as a welcome to students and visitors of the College to consider how collaboration and generational blessing may form a new kind of hospitality–a welcome of spiritual refreshment like that experienced by these two artists as they came together. And one element of that collaboration, S I L E N C E, is crucial.
The exhibition will be on view August 27–October 15, 2025, in the Gallery at Barrington Center for the Arts, Monday–Saturday, 9 a.m.–7 p.m. Free admission.
QU4RTETS No.4 (Winter—portrait of Osamu) 2012 oil and alkyd resin on wood with silver leaf; 97 x 60” collection of the artist
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
MAKOTO FUJIMURA
Makoto Fujimura is a leading contemporary artist whose work has been featured in galleries and museums around the world, including The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, The Huntington Library, the Tikotin Museum, Belvedere Museum, C3M North Bund Art Museum, and Pola Museum. His process-driven, refractive “slow art” has been described by David Brooks of The New York Times as “a small rebellion against the quickening of time.”
Fujimura is the author of five books: Art Is: A Journey Into the Light (Yale University Press, 2025), Art+Faith: A Theology of Making, Silence and Beauty, Refractions, and Culture Care. He is also the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2023 Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Life and the American Academy of Religion’s 2014 Religion and the Arts award. From 2003 to 2009, he served as a Presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts. He is a celebrated speaker and advocate for the arts.
Fujimura is also the founder of IAMCultureCare (formerly International Arts Movement), a not-for-profit organization which seeks to cultivate human flourishing by deepening faith, mending brokenness, and growing beauty by developing the global “Culture Care” movement and through educational initiatives. IAMCC’s Fujimura Institute created the historic Qu4rtets project in 2013. Fujimura also serves as the Artist Advocate Counsel for Embers International, a global organization championing the Whole Family Restoration model in the modern-day abolitionist movement.
BRUCE HERMAN
American painter and educator (b. 1953) lives with his wife Meg and extended family in Gloucester, Massachusetts––where he has his art studio. Herman’s paintings, prints, and drawings have been shown in more than 150 exhibitions––in Washington, New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles––and internationally in Italy, England, Japan, Hong Kong, Canada, and Israel. His work is featured in many public and private art collections including the Vatican Museum of Modern Religious Art in Rome; The Cincinnati Museum of Fine Arts print collection; The Grunewald Print Collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; DeCordova Museum in Boston; the Cape Ann Museum; and in many colleges and university collections throughout the United States and Canada.
Bruce Herman’s art has been published widely in books and journals. His new book, Makers by Nature, with IVP Academic Press, is available through all major book distributors.
Professor Herman taught and curated exhibitions at Gordon College from 1984 to 2023 and was the founding chair of the Art Department (begun in 1988). He held the Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts–Gordon College’s first endowed faculty appointment.
Herman completed both BFA and MFA degrees at Boston University College of Fine Arts under American artists Philip Guston, James Weeks, David Aronson, Reed Kay, and Arthur Polonsky.