Arts Rescue Mission -Aid For Aging Artists

Vol. 1, Issue 9, P. 1
Jan. 12, 2026

Jeff Jennings, Engineering a Sextant
D. M. Allison, January 12, 2026

(word count 1633) 

Jeff Jennings was never a product of an institution that asked its artists to commit early to a signature look, a marketable silhouette, or what some schools like RISD or Cranbrook quietly train as a lifelong patent. His education came instead from water, wood, steel, and necessity. From boatyards rather than critique rooms. From learning how things are made long before learning how they are discussed.

If you’re looking for his supplies, you’re likely to find them at a hardware store and not an art supply. That distinction matters. Jennings is a maker in the truest sense of the word, someone who understands that materials have limits, memory, and resistance, and that empathy is not only an emotional position but a practical one regarding his materials.  He learned to work with both wood and metal before he ever went to an art school. His work does not impose itself on materials; it negotiates with them.

I first met Jeff about a year after he arrived in Houston with his wife, Maureen, having left New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Much of the early work I saw then responded directly to rising water, forms shaped by loss, displacement, and endurance. New Orleans was his third port of call. He grew up in Maine, the son of a ship’s captain, always near the water. Later came Seattle, where he worked building boats. Each geography left a mark, not stylistically so much as structurally, in how he thinks.

Some artists can push pigment and throw paint like Itzhak Perlman can lead a band. You can’t throw steel, not yet anyway. Sculptors are the artists that must plan. They must draw. They must calculate. When their vision is driven with enough commitment and reaches public art scale it eventually has to pass through engineers, fabricators, city committees, and building codes before it ever reaches our eyes, so they must have a plan. 

I would soon see Jeff’s intimate maquettes at his home as he told me the story of how he worked out the initial engineering for the larger pieces on his patio, demonstrating his ability to conceive, create and then scale up beautifully to larger dimensions, and this is when I imagined his work soon should be at much larger scale. I've seen examples over the years but not thought about this process with artists like Jim Love and James Surls; a big toy made from lumber, a metal spiral made bending steel around a tree in the piney woods.  I'm not saying that sculptors are the only artists that need to plan when they start thinking of large-scale works, but they are the first to plan just getting it from an idea on the kitchen table to a pedestal in a gallery. Again, you can't throw metal like you can throw paint.

Houston has generational depth now in 2026, and other pioneers like Nestor Topchy, Michelle O'Michael, and Dixie Friend Gay setting the bar high with their public works. Richard Serra’s infamous Tilted Arc was not only installed by civic process, but removed by one, and reminds us that sculpture at scale exists within public consent and recalls sculptor Ed Wilson's ordeal navigating his first million dollar project through the approval process not once but twice. Instigated by architect Cameron Armstrong, hundreds came out during a “Gallery Row” evening walk wearing “ED” buttons showing support for Wilson’s project, a community recognizing one of our own when bureaucracy seemed destined to derail the Wilson's project for The Houston Convention Center. 
Sara could have used an Armstrong in his corner.  I could easily see Jennings’ pieces soon becoming graceful towering blooms on the Houston landscape, maybe as part of Gus Kopriva's Redbud Art Center True North project on Heights Blvd, or The Richmond Public Art Trail. I'm certain everyone mentioned before would probably wear “Jeff” buttons If called upon.

I called Jeff to ask if he might be willing to serve as a kind of guinea pig for the oral histories I hoped to include in the Arts Rescue Mission Archives. He told me he was working in the studio nearly around the clock, preparing for an upcoming show, except on Tuesdays, which he had set aside to visit Maureen. After a sudden stroke and illness, the year before, she had been moved into assisted living in 2024, and the rhythm of his week now revolved around that human center of gravity. Although the show was opening in just two weeks, he agreed without hesitation. The last time I saw Jeff was shortly after Maureen’s stroke; a couple of years had passed, celebration and tragedy have a way of pulling old friends back into orbit. “Come by anytime,” he said. I suggested the next day, knowing his time would soon evaporate as he prepared for the exhibition at Andrew Durham Gallery, where he had previously had a solo show in 2017.​​

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Andrew Durham Gallery is a young gallery already behaving like an old one,  patient, rigorous, and attentive to history, still finding room to have fun with it all, parking a DeLorean out in front of this gallery for his show “Space Time” in 2024.  Durham takes on the heavier responsibilities of exhibiting artists like Mac Whitney while bringing out the fun and love found in the mischievous woods of Houston’s “Itchy Acers” art community. Like William Campbell in Ft. Worth who came back from Vietnam as an artist before forming his gallery, Andrew started out as an artist attending the Glassell School before making the decision to open a renovated drycleaners as a gallery on W. Alabama in 2015.  This would be Jeff’s second solo show there.

Jeff and Maureen’s house sits just a few blocks down from Hiram Butler Gallery, on Blossom Street. Painted a cornflower blue with gold trim and wrapped in twenty years of garden growth, it’s so camouflaged I almost always drive past it and then negotiate the sudden ditches lining Blossom St. trying to park. It felt fitting. The house, like Jeff’s work, doesn’t announce itself, it’s a little tricky to arrive at, but well worth finding.

I arrived an hour early. Jeff wasn’t expecting me yet. He has a hearing impairment, and it took a moment before he realized I was at the door. We made coffee. Caught up on personal matters. We agreed deliberately not to talk politics, recognizing that if we did, the conversation would stretch into a week of old man vitriol and so before we started recording just agreed artists often sense historic shifts before they fully arrive, and artists will be among those who help us find a way through hardships both "foreign and domestic." Creating beauty, and learning to see it, can be a tonic. It felt like the right place to pause and consider Jeff’s journey: Maine to Seattle to New Orleans, navigating coastlines both literal and metaphorical. Over the years, his work has changed dramatically in appearance. Phone books carved into architectural objects. Hats painted as vessels of personal history. Ship forms, watercolors, drawings, wooden constructions, steel spirals. Yet we arrived at the same conclusion: the art may look different, but the same skipper has always been at the helm.

Jennings never committed to a single star. He grew up sailing, sometimes without a motor. When you sail that way, you can’t go straight. You tack. You adjust. You read the wind. You correct your course. You still have a destination, but you don’t reach it by pretending conditions don’t exist. That metaphor isn’t imposed. It’s lived.
Later, we moved through the house. In the living room, one of his carved book pieces sat inset into a large off-white frame, like an architectural intervention rather than an object hung on a wall. Small maquettes rested on an antique table in front of this piece, precursors to the larger works waiting outside. Jeff’s studio is small by sculptural standards, almost improbably so, yet he has made it work through ingenuity and restraint.

The path into the studio winds, steps down, turns left and right. It’s intimate and deliberate. Entering the studio in this way amplifies the effect, Jeff's studio "opens up," everything neatly ordered. There's a conservation of space here that actually dose create more room to work and display. New spiral forms appear here on the far wall, some as three-dimensional drawings, others as painted metal sculpture. Originality, Jennings believes, doesn’t come from trying to be original. It comes from trusting instinct long enough to arrive somewhere unfamiliar. Steering by the horizon, not the wake. We both agreed the trick is to know when to land.

Through the glass doors, on the patio, stood the most ambitious works for the upcoming show: steel sculptures suitable for indoor or outdoor installation. At my old gallery on Colquitt, we once tried to display some of his large wooden boat constructions outside. They blew over almost immediately, no matter how we anchored them. These new works, engineered, weighted, grounded, were different. Fluid, even delicate floral forms, a juxtaposition, a dichotomy, creating a tension between the graceful natural form and his engineered steel. In his unassuming gentle manner Jennings did land it, nailed it, the artist-surfers out there will understand it when I say I was looking a very well thought out "Brodie," a risky commitment, with no guarantee, only great if it works and you land it, damn foolish if it doesn't, the artist's time and materials are only part of the gamble with a show coming up.