In Unfolding Hope, Cindee Travis Klement honors the sandhill crane, depicting a powerful story of loss and recovery. Spanning nearly thirty feet, the painting unfolds across four sections – Quiet Estuary, Life’s Stubborn March, Courtship Dance, and Knowledge Is the Bridge – showing a coastal prairie estuary at dawn, where cranes and other migratory birds fly, wade, and move through wetlands.

Cindee’s process begins with large-scale drawings that are torn and reassembled, then layered with watercolor and ink, and sprayed with water to create drips and washes of color. Fragments of a handwritten poem composed by the artist emerge up close, with phrases such as “roots drinking the sky” and “the prairie held her breath.”

The work draws from the history of the sandhill crane, whose population declined sharply in the early 1900s. Aldo Leopold’s pivotal 1937 essay “Marshland Elegy” helped bring attention to their disappearance and contributed to the conservation efforts that led to the cranes’ remarkable recovery. Today, thousands of cranes return each year to the marshes where their loss was once recorded.

For Cindee, this success story is a model for how art and literature can shape how we see and act in relation to the natural world, an idea central to her practice. “Being an eco-artist means I don’t make art about problems—I make art about possibility,” she writes. In Unfolding Hope, she presents the cranes’ return as evidence of what is possible for us today, writing that “what was nearly lost can be held again – because it already has been.”

Cindee Travis Klement is a Houston-based artist whose research-driven practice spans sculpture, video, painting, and printmaking. The Jones Artist Awards program provided an opportunity for her to explore this new collage process at a larger scale.

Photography by Rony Canales

Videography by Tripp Films