Laurel Justice 2026

Since 2000, the Pantone Color Institute has named a “Color of the Year”—a shade meant to capture the cultural mood of the moment. The choice comes after gatherings of color experts from around the world who meet in a European capital, share what they’re seeing across art, fashion, design, and culture, and debate their way to a single color they believe reflects the year ahead. This year’s choice, Cloud Dancer, struck me as especially poignant. The soft, airy white suggests a longing for lightness—for breath, for imagination, for a reset. Less a trend, it feels like an invitation.
My last show at Surface Gallery opened in May of 2023. Two weeks later, my artmaking came to a screeching halt when my son, Calder, was diagnosed with brain cancer. For the next two years my nervous system ran at an 11 out of 10. I gained weight, I barely slept, my income dropped, and any steady sense of wellness disappeared.  Eventually I sought the help of a psychedelic medicine trauma practitioner in Denver who guided me back to myself—one plant medicine journey at a time. I’m grateful to say my son survived and is now thriving as a schoolteacher in Colorado Springs. His story is heroic and brave, and it’s his to tell. Mine, as a mother, cracked something open. The experience reshaped how I think about the body that carries a lifetime of imprinting, the threshold we call death, and the mysterious terrain we sometimes glimpse beyond it.  “Cloud Dancer” resonates with me as the place I live now…still embodied but carefully attuned to the thin places—where breath, grief, wonder, and grace move quietly between worlds. - Laurel Justice