Jones Artist Awards Program
Jones Artist Awards Program
The Houston Endowment Jones Artist Awards Program was created by the Foundation in 2023 to recognize local artists and reflect the many stories and perspectives of Greater Houston’s residents. Jones Artist Award recipients receive individual grants and the opportunity to exhibit their work on a rotating basis in Houston Endowment’s headquarters.
Selection Process
Through Weingarten Art Group, Houston Endowment conducts a public open call for submissions each year. The initial call in late 2022 received over 140 submissions.
Meet the 2026 Jones Artists
Nine Houston-based artists have been selected as recipients of the 2025 Jones Artist Award.
Current Exhibition
The Hardest Love We Carry
The Hardest Love We Carry takes its title from Jane Hirshfield’s poem “Hope and Love,” which considers hope as a sustaining force carried forward. Grounded in the featured artists’ own lives and family histories, the exhibition traces how people move through loss, change, and uncertainty. Across the photographic works included, moments of vulnerability come into focus, revealing where resolve is strengthened, creativity intervenes, and resilience begins to take shape.
Past Exhibitions
Chasing Light
The final installation of 2025, Chasing Light, is about the creative process as a pursuit. For the four artists featured, it is less about the promise of arriving somewhere and more a practice of staying open and letting their materials and processes lead. Here, ritual turns inward rather than expressed as a shared experience. In these personal rituals, the creative process is meditative, seeking clarity, release, and, at times, repair.
Re:Collection
Anat Ronen gathers old photographs and transforms them into a mural layered with paintings. The exhibition invites us to reflect on this sense of impermanence, our attempts to hold on through the objects we keep, and the rituals of analog photography.
Between Me and You
Artists explore how daily rituals ground them. They remind us that simple, everyday actions, when done with intention, can sustain us emotionally and spiritually, strengthen our resilience, and help us discover beauty in ordinary moments.
Traces of Being
Artists evoke thoughts about the lasting traces our histories impart and how they inform who we are. The installation questions how the past — inherited family relics, memories, and cultural heritage — blends with the present and personal experiences to shape our individual identities.
Con Cariño
Con Cariño, which translates to “with love” or “with care,” pays homage to Hernandez’s parents, who left their homeland in search of a brighter future for their family. It reflects the powerful connections between generations and relates to a broader narrative of migration, resilience, and family devotion.
Nature’s Imprints
Artists reflect on the palpable and profound ways the natural world impacts our lives and informs our sense of being. With media ranging from collage, photography, and video animation, works offer visually subtle yet insightful takes on our exchange with nature, from the meaning we embed within landscape to the many imprints — historical, social, and environmental — that it leaves on us.
Where is Home?
This group installation reflects the concept of home not as a fixed, physical location, but as a sense of belonging. It invites us to question and reflect on our understanding of home, reminding us that it is a complex interplay of culture, memory, and identity.
Songbook for Black Constellations, for Trio
This solo exhibition by Corey De’Juan Sherrard, Jr. presents data on Black demographics and institutions in the U.S. through a unique pairing of painting and music.
Salvation is my heart on display
This installation features the work of four artists who present gestures of embrace, images of togetherness, and depictions of people in their homes and places of comfort – each beyond the harsh lens of the outside world, its judgment and violence – where we can simply be.
Please note the exhibition is in a private office space and not available for public viewing. All artwork is available for purchase. If you are interested in purchasing a piece, please contact Weingarten Art Group.