Grinding Gold in a City of Dust

Makoto Fujimura's painting studio sat in lower Manhattan, near the World Trade Center. On September 11, 2001, when the towers collapsed, ash and pulverized concrete drifted over his neighborhood like gray snow. The Japanese-American artist, celebrated for his luminous works created with the ancient Nihonga technique, watched his city become a landscape of ruin. In the weeks that followed, Fujimura returned to his studio and did what he had always done.…