When Mourning Became Color

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Japanese-American artist Makoto Fujimura was in his studio in lower Manhattan when the Twin Towers fell. Ash and debris drifted through his neighborhood as the city he loved was torn apart. For days, the acrid smell of destruction hung over everything.

Fujimura is a master of Nihonga, an ancient Japanese painting technique that requires grinding precious minerals — azurite, malachite, gold leaf — into fine powder by hand, then layering them on handmade paper until they catch the light. In the weeks after the attacks, he returned to his studio and picked up his brushes. He chose to create beauty in the very neighborhood where destruction had done its worst. The minerals he pulverized each morning — beautiful stones reduced to dust before becoming radiant pigment — now carried a weight they had never held before.

Fujimura would later write and teach extensively on the artist's responsibility to bring beauty into broken places, a conviction that led to his appointment to the National Council on the Arts in 2003.

Psalm 30:11 says, "You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy." Notice that God does not skip the wailing. He transforms it. The sackcloth comes off, but the memory of wearing it shapes the dance that follows.