2025 Commencement Speaker
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.”
Born in Boston and educated in Japan and the United States, Fujimura was the first non-Japanese citizen to be accepted into the post-MFA doctoral program at Tokyo University of the Arts in the longstanding lineage of Nihonga tradition. He also holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Tokyo University of the Arts and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bucknell University.
Fujimura is the author of five books: Art Is: A Journey Into the Light (Yale University Press, forthcoming October 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. An advocate for the arts, from 2003–2009 Fujimura served as a presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts and more recently was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania for the 2024-25 academic year.
In 2013 Gordon’s Barrington Center for the Arts hosted the “QU4RTETS” exhibition. The show featured paintings by Fujimura and was developed in collaboration with Bruce Herman, painter and former Gordon College Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts; composer Christopher Theofanidis; and theologian Jeremy Begbie. The exhibition included works in paint, poetry and music, all developed in response to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Paintings from the Qu4rtets project will again be exhibited at the Barrington Center for the Arts alongside new works by Fujimura next fall, August 27–October 15, 2025.