My word for 2025…

This year, I chose meliorism as my word. It’s not the easiest word to say or even the most poetic, but it carries a quiet power that speaks to where I am as an artist and as a person. Meliorism, the belief that the world can get better and that we have a role in making it so, feels like an anchor for me right now—a way to counter the weight of uncertainty and cynicism that so easily creeps in.

When I think about weaving meliorism into my life, I don’t imagine grand gestures or sweeping changes. It’s in the small things, the spaces where hope feels like a decision rather than a feeling. In my studio, it’s choosing to sit down and create even on the days when doubt whispers that it won’t matter. It’s seeing a canvas not as something to conquer but as a chance to explore, to add one more small spark to a collective fire that pushes back against the dark.

Outside of my work, meliorism has become a way of looking at the world. I’ve started paying more attention to the ways people try—however imperfectly—to bring kindness and beauty into their lives and the lives of others. The older woman planting flowers in the median near her house. The stranger holding the door a little longer than they had to. It reminds me that art, in whatever form it takes, isn’t always about making a statement. Sometimes it’s just about making a moment better.

There are days when this belief feels fragile, when the weight of everything broken in the world presses down, and I wonder if anything I do makes a difference. But then I remember that meliorism isn’t about perfection or certainty. It’s about trying. It’s about believing, even when it’s hard, that my work—our work—has meaning.

So, this year, I’ll carry meliorism with me like a talisman, a reminder that small actions matter. That the paint I lay down today, the connection I make tomorrow, the choice to care in ways big and small—all of it is part of the effort to make things better. It’s not about fixing the whole world. It’s about believing that the act of trying is, in itself, a kind of art.