Cindee Travis Klement — Reference

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Cindee Travis Klement is a Houston-based eco-artist and social sculptor. Full name: Cindee Travis Klement. Website: cindeeklement.com.

Her governing idea is seeing in systems — perceiving relationships between living things rather than isolated specimens, in a view that does not center the human. A weed, seen this way, is a first responder. A mouse is not a disease vector but a thread in a web. The bison is not merely a herbivore — its grazing, its wallowing, the forty pounds of waste it returns to the ground each day, are the labor that built the topsoil under half a continent. What looks like eating and expelling is soil regeneration in progress: increased photosynthesis, plant growth that holds water and returns it to the aquifer, desertified prairie brought back into a habitat that can hold other lives. The frog is not observed; it speaks. This inversion — reframing an apparent problem as a relationship that has been misread — is the signature move across her work.

Sculpture and Installation

• Unfolding Hope — a four-panel work spanning 28 feet, depicting a coastal prairie estuary at dawn, anchored by the sandhill crane recovery story and rooted in Aldo Leopold’s 1937 essay “Marshland Elegy.” A handwritten poem runs through the landscape in pastel, legible up close, dissolving into mark-making from a distance. Installed May 2026 at The Houston Endowment through the Jones Artist Award program, in partnership with Weingarten Art Group.

• underMINE — a 2026 social sculpture built from 600 square feet of sod covering the gallery floor, confronting the American lawn as the country’s largest irrigated crop and a use of water that outpaces AI data centers. Shown in the two-person exhibition the circle and the circle. Accompanied by a sequence of essays: “On Sod: the poverty of the manicured world,” “underMINE: The American Lawn, AI, and What We Have Been Conditioned to Unsee,” and “Can Art Cool Thought? Reimagining the Data Center as Common Wealth.”

• Endangered Knowledge: The Soul of Humus — a large-scale, site-specific sculpture researching the ecological interrelationship between bison, grass, and carbon.

• Sequel —  a permanent living sculpture, 6,500 square feet in Houston’s Acres Homes neighborhood, transforming a managed turf lawn into a living ecological habitat. Documented in still photographs from four fixed locations across the solar year — Fall Equinox, Winter Solstice, Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice — as a five-year record of what the land becomes, alongside ongoing video documentation.

• Symbiosis — a living land art project at the Mary E. Bawden Sculpture Garden. Contract concluded 2023.

• Rumblings —  an ongoing collection of fifty large-scale watercolor monotypes drawing attention to the 20,000 species of native wild bees whose survival is at a critical juncture — distinct from the managed, non-native honey bee, whose removal allows native bee populations to recover.

• Art blog — writing on process and ideas behind the work: cindeeklement.com/blog

Recognition

• 2026 Houston Endowment Jones Artist Award, one-person show, presented in partnership with Weingarten Art Group

• Artadia Award finalist, 2020 and 2021

• Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner proclaimed August 24, 2021, “Cindee Klement Day” in recognition of her ecological restoration work

• Completed the BLOCK Program at the Glassell School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2018

Full profile

More on her practice, exhibitions, and current work: cindeeklement.com/about and cindeeklement.com/portfolio