Four Artists Pursue Ritual and Renewal in Chasing Light

Houston Endowment’s Jones Artist Awards Program highlights creativity as a practice of discovery

For the four artists featured in Chasing Light—Jamie Sterling Pitt(opens in new window), Margaux Crump(opens in new window), Abbie Preston Edmonson(opens in new window), and Richard Poe(opens in new window)—creating art is about the journey, not the destination. Their works comprise the third installment of Houston Endowment’s 2025 Jones Artist Awards Program and showcase creativity as a meditative, restorative, and sometimes transformative ritual.

Created in 2023, the awards program recognizes and supports local emerging artists and reflects the many stories and perspectives that shape the cultural landscape of Greater Houston’s residents. It is curated by Weingarten Art Group(opens in new window).

“Chasing Light provides a look into the artistic process—the craft, the making, and the motivations that keep these artists telling their perspectives,” said Bao-Long Chu, Program Director for Arts & Culture and Greenspaces at Houston Endowment. “These artists remind us that not only is art an act of discovery, but also it helps us make sense of our experiences and connect more deeply with one another.”

The theme of the 2025 Jones Artist Awards was rituals; Pitt, Crump, Edmonson, and Poe were selected for the way their works seek internal rituals, rather than external experiences. Their works showcase the consistency and steady patience creators must endure on the journey to share their perspectives with a greater audience. For example, candle wax drips in Crump’s For Release, and viewers take in the fleeting moments of wavy crescents in Poe’s photographs  of an eclipse.

All artists and artworks included in the exhibit are:

Jamie Sterling Pitt

• Untitled
• Untitled
• Untitled (Orange Energy)
• Union #1
• Chart #3 (Chimayo Wand)
• Untitled
• Untitled (Warrior/Star)
• Untitled (Young Earth)
• Untitled (Ocean Dial #1)

Pitt’s works are modest in scale, richly tactile, and quietly animated, carrying a sense of intimacy and familiarity. What may read as abstraction to us is, for Pitt, a direct transcription of what he sees. After a car accident and severe traumatic brain injury, he no longer perceives depth. Space is flattened to a single plane. As a faculty member at California College of the Arts at the time of the injury, and with no real recovery resources, Pitt turned to the disciplines of teaching and studio work to rebuild and steady his memory and language. That commitment has become a ritual pursuit of giving form to fleeting sensations. The two works on paper in the exhibition, with rows of small glyphs and diagrams, read like a journal of accumulated impressions. The early painted-wood sculptures from 2009, made from found materials, feel raw and intuitive, while the 2021 sculptures grow more architectural and playful with the introduction of bright ceramics. What may feel emblematic to us, hovering just above the familiar, is, for Pitt, a portal rather than a symbol. His works are a literal record shaped through resilience and ingenuity, giving us a direct glimpse into his hard-won and singular way of seeing.

Margaux Crump

• Spells for Protection
• The Parting Gift: Diagrams for Being
• For Release
• Catching My Breath

Crump’s work explores the realms of magic and myth, using time-based processes to coax quiet phenomena to the surface. For Release emerged as a means to overcome a period of creative block for the artist. Over the course of nine months, she created and burned candles, letting layers of wax accumulate. “Each time I sat with a burning candle, I offered my fears to the flame,” she writes. The final photograph, faintly scorched at the top edge of the frame, is a quiet record of heat, containment, and letting go. In Spells for Protection, smoke from burned herbs marks silk, to which Crump responds by drawing in graphite and mica. The drawings are then submerged into brine to grow salt crystals into the fibers. This process was inspired by the Scottish folk practice known as saining, intended for ritual purification. Catching My Breath pairs a flycatcher vessel with flowers, all covered under the seal of plastic, and is a haunting meditation on breath and impermanence. Finally, The Parting Gift: Diagrams for Being reimagines drawings by her grandfather (a scientist whom she never got a chance to meet) translated from his yellow notecards into cyanotypes that read like blueprints for living, tracing ideas of cosmic flow and our place in the world.

Abbie Preston Edmonson

• Between Starshine and Clay

Edmonson created three new vessels for this exhibition. Titled Between Starshine and Clay, a phrase borrowed from Lucille Clifton’s poem won’t you celebrate with me, the work pairs clay with handmade paper that is stitched together with her grandmother’s thread. The clay is left unglazed and non-watertight “as a metaphor for the release of contained emotions,” Edmonson notes. The paper points to a childhood memory of balled-up toilet paper used to wipe tears at home, a fragile counterpoint to the endurance we associate with clay. Edmonson water-etches handwritten phrases onto the unfired clay, drawing on poems and essays by Clifton, Mary Oliver, and Sylvia Plath, as well as shared sayings from women in the artist’s life. In this process, the clay is gently removed, leaving the text behind, much like how grief or sadness imprint itself on us and quietly remains even as the world around us moves forward with the everyday rhythms of life.

Richard Poe

• Moon Dance
• Sky Watch
• Walkabout
• Ellipse Eclipse
• Cloud Spotting

The exhibition closes with Poe’s photographs, which quite literally chase light. Walking his mostly wild 3.5-acre land outside Austin, he waits for moments when color and shadow tip into spectacle: a slice of sky gone electric blue, the orange in the clouds flipping to vivid pink and washing the ground in the same hue, or the wavy crescent shadows that appear only during an eclipse. He then cuts and recombines these photographs into collages, producing archival digital prints that compress sky and earth into a single plane and turn landscape into lyrical studies of abstraction and movement. Poe is drawn to shared rituals of looking, such as honoring the four directions as a daily practice, watching the full moon rise monthly, or gathering on those rare occasions to witness an eclipse, all arguing for the value of holding focus until the right light hits.

The public is encouraged to visit HoustonEndowment.org for more details of the series. Photos of Chasing Light are available here(opens in new window). Please credit Nicki Evans courtesy of Weingarten Art Group (@weingartenartgroup) and Houston Endowment (@HoustonEndowment).

Houston Endowment has a long-standing commitment to the arts, beginning with its founding by Jesse H. and Mary Gibbs Jones in 1937. The Joneses recognized the significant value arts and culture provided to the community and envisioned the world-class arts that exist in Houston today. Today, the Foundation seeks to build a sustainable arts and culture sector where individual artists can strengthen and sustain their creative careers.

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About Houston Endowment
Houston Endowment is a private foundation established in 1937 by Jesse H. Jones and his wife, Mary Gibbs Jones, to improve the quality of life for everyone in Greater Houston. Today, it has more than $2 billion in assets and invests about $100 million a year in strengthening public education, increasing civic engagement, enhancing the region’s arts sector, and growing Houston’s greenspaces.