2025: My year of protesting through art

I tend to tag years as you would an Instagram photo. The year of #travel or #resilience or #depression—one word that can overarchingly summarize a pervasive theme over the time that has passed. For me, 2025 was the year of #art. Exploring it. Tasting it. Hearing it. Attempting it. Clinging to the peace and power that comes with creating when every other corner of daily life ignites fury and fear. Training my conscious mind to convince my psyche to believe I am what I crave to be: an artist. 

2025 was the year I was thrusted into my daydream of ‘working for myself’ and ‘living a creative life, free of the confines of PTO, 9-5, and quarterly KPIs’. Those fragmented and half-baked daydreams tasted delicious to my corporate burnout self of the past. What they turned out to be, once the reality of no consistent income set in, were a series of personal tests, challenges to my core identity, and 365 opportunities to discover the fabric of my own constitution—my contribution, and the potential thereof, to the world around me. 

I read books on art. The journey of making it. The journey of understanding it. The culture and vultures behind it, deciding what distinguishes a brilliant masterpiece from merely craft fodder. I learned that an art gallery’s quintessential stark white walls, intense lighting, and sharp angles originated as a form of Nazi architecture-as-propaganda, reflecting their quest for “cultural purification”. I learned that Van Gogh was not respected by the critics of his lifetime, but that he had a deeply beautiful and earnest relationship with his brother and sister-in-law. I learned that creating art requires constant decision making, and chasing, and wrangling. I learned that you can get sick of it—of the attempt of it. Drained, tapped, rung dry, and irritable. I learned that avoiding it only agitates the primal-like necessity of facing it. Of trying again. I learned that art is a choice; one you have to choose over and over again. Even when you don’t feel up to it. Especially then. I learned that the goal of art is to share who we are and how we see the world. 

In a world where depravity reigns, I learned how dire it is to surround ourselves with things we find beautiful, make us feel seen, not alone. How simply the act of creating, no matter the quality of the outcome, is resisting complacency. An act of protest. In a world so dissected, torn apart, polarized, I learned that art can unite, introduce, organize, and educate. In a world that denies nuance and builds platforms and economies on generalizations, art introduces an infinite spectrum of details and perspectives, lessons, takes, emotions—information. In a world that distracts, art centers, highlights, challenges, ponders, explores, considers. Art calls out the very thing that is trying to remain hidden, inconspicuous, repressed. In a world that forces numbness and celebrates callousness, art makes you feel. It narrows the space between you and the world, leaving you vulnerable, bare, and porous as you stare back at the mirror of yourself, your environment, your place in time.

Art is the narration to culture. The expression of the collective. The consciousness externalized. I discovered that the art which moved me most was art that which made me angry. Art that exposes narratives we’ve been fed for generations as what they are: lies, falsities, power dynamics at play, the rewriting of realities in a way in which served few and influenced many. Art reflects movements. Art is the work of revolutions. The products and byproducts of it. Art doesn’t care whether you believe or are moved by it, nor does it demand your affiliation, loyalty, fealty. It simply is. It extends itself as offering, ready to be received yet totally at peace if it is overlooked. Its existence remains, even if one labels it valueless. And as long as it exists, it holds potential. Power. Power to connect. To communicate. To agitate. To move. 

Art begets itself. It ignites the potentiality of it—the inspiration, the pull of it. Its burn that rages deep beneath your bellybutton as it claws its way outward. But it can also burn out in an instant, leaving nothing but the memory of it churning slowly and thick through the air like smoke after a wildfire. When you’re able to harness the fleeting moment of inspiration, art is pure freedom. It has no limitations. It is a product of your wildest imagination. It is a liberation of personhood.  

I refer to myself as an artist now, frankly, because I must. I deserve to. Not because I actually believe it; not really. But because I am choosing a path where I must unfold the parts of myself and transform what I discover into something I can share with the world. To challenge myself to consistently see the world with eyes wide open. All the parts. Not just the parts I want to see or am most comfortable observing. As authoritarianism creeps closer to our daily lives, art reminds me of my power. The art of war is also the war of art.

I haven’t made a lot of “good” art. I’m not sure I’ve many any of it, it be honest. But I’ve learned that the magic is in the attempt. The consistent reintroduction of your conscious mind into a space of limitless possibility. It’s intimidating. It’s overwhelming. It’s draining. 

It’s worth it.