Slow Life: Jamie Sterling Pitt Artist Talk
August 30, 2026
Jardin, 2608 Dunlavy St. Houston, TX
Jamie Sterling Pitt:
Hello, I'm Jamie Sterling Pitt. I'm the artist. I live here in Houston. I've been here two and a half years now. I was in Santa Fe and the Bay Area before that and grew up in New York. I met Tessa about a month and a half ago maybe, and we mind-melded and made this show happen.
Amazingly enough, my career kind of started eighteen years ago with a shop show in San Francisco, with a storefront window facing the street. So, it felt like a return to form, or about how to show work outside of a white whale and in context, because I think my work is made in conversation with my daily life. This felt perfect.
Tessa Granowski:
That's great. I’m glad you brought that up already, because I posed that question to the last artist, Ewelina Bochenska, as well. It's obviously not a traditional format for viewing contemporary artwork, but I find this space to be really conducive to looking. And with all of the fun, beautiful things happening, it can create further engagement, and it's been able to open up the work to new audiences. I thought it was particularly fitting for your work. I think you have a lot of elements of “high-low” in your art practice. The flowers are a really great example. Do you want to talk about your flower subscription?
JSP:
Yeah, it started at the beginning of this year. You know, you make all these very private things, and then you go to art school, and you're told no one-liners, it's too obvious, or, it's an illustration. And I just thought that the news and the state of the world has been weighing on us. And I just want to give people flowers. That sort of exchange felt so much more important, especially because it’s a flower that doesn't die. So, here's scrap from the things I'm making, and I will make twelve a year and have a subscription. People can get one and done, or they can do a whole year. And it's so beautiful, the conversations I'm having with the people that have invested in it. It's seeing that one-to-one of how your work affects people, I think for me at this point in my career is really important.
Every time I do an exhibition, everyone wants to talk to you and look at your work, but for me, I'm always looking to make sure my friends and family are comfortable. This space in particular was lovely during the opening because I could see that my people were sitting outside laughing or having dinner. There’s a formality of just being alive at openings that could be so much more comfortable than everyone awkwardly standing hungry trying to figure out how to either get somewhere or go somewhere. I admire a lot of the galleries in Tokyo, Japan, because they're in shops, they're in restaurants.
Artwork isn't separate from life. In a moment where I feel like art is more essential than ever, but the first thing to go, we have to learn to adapt a little bit to those structures where art will appear and exceed people's expectations. I think Tessa is doing a wonderful job at that.
TG:
Thank you. I also wanted to start by talking about the title of the show, which is Slow Life. How did you choose that title?
JSP:
It is a quote from this wonderful book that you can get at Basket Books (Joseph Grigely: Otherhow: Essays and Documents on Art and Disability, 1985-2024). Joseph Grigley is an artist who is deaf, and the book is an anthology of all of his writings. The majority of the writings are him corresponding with institutions for over thirty years about accommodations and being asked to show at museums and not knowing how to get into his own exhibition while he is stuck in a parking lot. But the heart of it, and where that title comes from, is an essay about the artist James Castle, who made his work with the soot from his fireplace, or spit on cardboard. I love this idea of necessity—that it's in you and it doesn't matter what you have to make that happen. Grigely talks about how the idea of a still life comes from pausing a moment in time, and it excludes the warfare and everything else ugly. It’s usually a way of saying, look how great our empire is or our lives are, and in reality, everything's falling apart around it.
Within the history of the still life, people started painting rotting fruit with flies. And there's this implication of time and decay and all the messy stuff that I feel like as artists we deal with all the time, or just as human beings. And he talks about James Castle and artists who are disabled living a slow life versus a still life. I really identify with that, because things like a doorknob or a comb or simple objects take a different meaning to your tactility when you are disabled. You don't just see the front of something. You see a doorknob in 360 degrees. And that's your threshold to get from one spot to the next. It's not like doorknob, car, turn on the car, zoom to work. There’s a lot of negotiation with form that comes in, and has always come into my sculptural practice, and now is coming into my painting practice.
TG:
I wanted to talk about your painting practice because I was especially curious about the surfaces of the paintings and the way that you build them up. It almost resembles when an artist paints over an older painting again and again, but I'm curious, based on the material list, you're also imbuing it with a certain charged energy through specific materials in the surface. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
JSP:
Yeah, if you come to my studio, it's like a science lab. I was raised by a scientist, and it makes sense. But I'm also very into ritual and what can be released through different elements or combinations of different elements. Rather than thinking of the history of painting and the restrictions of it, I have been thinking how can you take a material that is so specific to that moment and to you, but it means almost nothing to anybody else and put it together. I hadn't painted since undergraduate, which was 30 years ago now maybe, and I actually went to grad school as a painter, but then the sculptor Ron Nagle, who's still a buddy and was my mentor at Mills College, was like, no one paints anymore! So, you give it up. And you don't even have the confidence in your 20s to be like, you just gave me a full ride to come to your school, and you're telling me I'm not good enough to keep doing this?
But it’s because it's what the trend is right now, and it's in service of the institution, not the individual. When I moved to Houston two and a half years ago, I was still making sculptures. I did a residency at the Craft Center (Houston Center for Contemporary Craft) and was making furniture. I was seeing space differently, building furniture and environments along with the sculptures. When I was there, I started using reclaimed wood. And the Menil and different museums were giving me their old crates. So, I built furniture for other artists to use my studio as their workspace. In doing that, I started seeing these vignettes and still lifes in the space. I started to ease into it a little bit, by building the whole environment. A year and a half ago, I just said, I want to paint. My studio is right by Texas Art Supply, so I just went over and got a canvas and some paint.
And I frickin' painted! It felt like a reclamation. I spent a year teaching myself to paint with acrylic again. Mind you, I've taught painting at Stanford and Berkeley. I know how to paint. I just wasn't letting myself do it. And why that is as an artist makes no sense. Like, who are you performing for? And how long do you keep that performance going before finding that the deepest secret is actually inside of me, and I'm the only one that knows it's there, and I can go down with that, or I can share it, and hopefully other people will see the secret in it too. And so, back to the surfaces— I started volunteering at the garden at the Craft Center and learned a bunch about native flowers through the flower bank, where they're all pressed. It was life-changing because they're all pressed while they're moving to the sun still. They're not naturally dying; they're still in bloom and pressed.
They looked like the most beautiful drawings or a ballet, almost. I started thinking about that material of these native flowers that are thriving in this crazy weather we have here. I never knew how tropical it was going to be in Houston before moving here. So, I collect flowers, dry them, pulp them and mix them in with an archival latex. You can see bits in the painting that are actual flowers. And I'm very interested in how tropical a lot of those flowers are and how a lot of them are from Mexico and how they are the most direct thread to the fact that we're in Mexico. We talk about invasive and native— just the poetry of that is enough.
For about a decade now I’ve been using the sawdust from cutting wood on my sculptures. I have a drawing practice that isn't that evident here, but I cut these with a jigsaw. And when you cut, you lose an eighth of an inch or so in dust. I like thinking about that lost line being a particle on the ground and then reconstructing it into a matter that can then be the surface of something that isn't a mask. It just confuses what that materiality is and how you access it and that can exceed your expectations of what it is. There's the dust in there too, which gets put in with the archival latex. And then lastly, the acrylic washes that go down before the oil. I collect water from specific sites. A big one that I collect from is Jemez Springs in the mountains of New Mexico where my father's ashes are scattered. I collect the rainwater here, or the bayou water, and I just use reverse osmosis to take out the chemicals. And that’s part of the painting ground too. That is all there before the painting even starts. Sometimes it's hard to even want to paint on it, but that's not the point. The painting becomes a skin.
TG:
Yeah. And not only in the way you symbolically build up a surface, but your paintings have other little clues, symbols or references in the titles of your “art parents” or your influences. And so maybe if you want to talk a little bit about even this one right behind you, or the title of this one comes from a photograph that we both knew about.
Coincidentally, as a side note, the photo that Jamie named this work after was at the beginning of an essay from my favorite teacher from USC Art History, Suzanne Hudson, paired with her essay about Blinky Palermo, and it was the photograph before her essay. It’s a photograph of Imi Knoebel and Blinky Palermo in New Mexico.
JSP:
It was a photograph me and my friend Shane Tolbert had in the bathroom at our space Best Western in Santa Fe. It's a photo I love because it's the two of them dressed like cowboys. It's their first time coming from Germany to the US, and they land in Madrid, New Mexico, which is on the Turquoise Trail. It's still funky—I love it there. It was an old mining town, and artists took it over. They tipped the boxcars, and to this day there are stacked boxcars with artists living in them. And I love that these 2 German constructionists who put on their Pecos Red Wings and cowboy hats and they're like, we've made it to America! They end up both in New York City after that, which was quite different, I think, to their experience of being in the Southwest. But it's one of my favorite photographs, you know, and this idea of forging the history of the American West.
TG:
And this one behind you has the initials “T.R” and “V.S.”
JSP:
Yeah, that’s for Tal R. and Valentine Schlegel, who were 2 artists that I was thinking about a lot in the production of this work.
TG:
I didn't know Valentine Schlegel’s work until you shared her with me, but it turned out she was good friends with one of my favorite filmmakers, Agnès Varda, and Agnès made a short film about her.
I think this is a nice segue into talking about this new series of work and material where you've been using a certain type of foam and kind of forming it into shaped plaster altarpieces like the one you can see right when you walk in, or the big flowers in the window. If you want to talk a little bit about that kind of new material and where you're going with that?
Jamie Sterling Pitt, Cardinal, 2026, oil on board in artist frame, 10.5 x 8.5 x 0.75” (painting)
JSP:
At the very foundation of how I work, it's always about tools and a material, or materiality, and how to push materiality in our understanding of what we're working with or looking at. It really started about a decade ago. I had a show at Ratio 3 in San Francisco, and they were all wooden sculptures, even smaller than these. And Frieze Magazine came to write a review, and you want to assume that art writers for publications have a keen eye and that they're going to look at the material list. They wrote that they were ceramic! At that moment I realized I don't need to make ceramics if I don't want to. I can make whatever I want.
And stay tuned because around Halloween, or I guess early October… I've been working on a bespoke graveyard for a patron. And he can't lift heavy objects, so in doing material research, he was like, what about foam? I've always been dead set against using fiberglass but there's a new dense foam that isn't toxic. It doesn't make dust, nothing. It's crazy! And I guess they're using it a lot in Hollywood for props. And they started making jigsaw blades that cut it, so you don’t have to use hot wires. In a way, it's just like using plywood. And kind of with the physical limitations of my body already, plywood has had a lot of kickback and so I realized, oh, I can scale up or do anything with this. And the whole thing with it is that to make it archival, you just have to like prime it, coat it (a lot), sand it, and paint it. It's like making a surfboard. For this show, I started playing around with the offcuts from these tombstones. And somehow, using the foam as a building block, it adds a different kind of mass or understanding of what it is, and I can build something bigger that weighs nothing.
And playing with the expectation of what you're seeing, the thing that's the smallest is the heaviest and the thing that's the largest is the lightest. And as somebody who has done a lot of art handling, there's something so satisfying about a twig being made out of lead and a totem being made out of foam. It's about the wonder of the weight of something.
TG:
I really like the idea that every offcut, and every little piece in your studio is being reclaimed and added back into the work. It reminds me of the way that certain chefs work in a kitchen, where you use every part of the animal, you use the bone for the broth. We've talked a lot about Alice Waters and Chez Panisse as well. Is that part of your thinking?
JSP:
Absolutely. I think being a young artist in San Francisco at a time where tech had collapsed was really renegade. A lot of the construction projects just stopped. You would just grab wood over fences. All you'd have to do is go with 3 buddies on your skateboard and hop the fence. And someone spray paints the fence if there is a security camera. And then you have a whole exhibition out of that material.
Or we'd rent a laundromat and be like, let's do a show in the laundromat. $50 if you'll stay open for 2 hours, we'll lock up and bring you the key. And all of a sudden people see us spill out onto the street and they're like, what's going on? And it's that kind of curiosity of where art can intervene, I think is so important and necessary right now.
TG:
Over the years you've been involved with or helped run artist spaces, like Best Western. Would you mind talking a little bit about running those spaces and also the importance as an artist in opening that up to work with other artists and what that does for you?
JSP:
Yeah, I didn't expect to get to this point, you know. I think deep down we have to trust that we understand. And it's a funny word, but it came up in a documentary Tessa shared today, that our innermost workings are of quality (this is from an Arvo Pärt documentary: And then came the evening and the morning). And we don't think of our being as being quality. But in the end, I feel like if you're honest to that, you end up continuing to do it. Because the right people see it in what you do.
After maybe 5 years of exhibiting in the Bay Area, I had a studio that was a horse stable. And I started this thing called Mesa where I'd open the horse stable doors. And at that time, I tried to get a sense of what the art community was at that moment. And I was giving grad students their first solo show in my studio for a weekend. And at that point I was like, I have the Rolodex of all the people that they want to see their work.
And I would make hot dogs and have some Tecates and sparkling waters, and families would come in from the neighborhood, and they'd be like, this is awesome, you know? There you would get so many different conversations and perspectives of what's happening, and there's no pressure. There's really just the work and people. And when I moved to Santa Fe, Shane Tolbert started a similar project in his house, and I joined in and we ended up getting an old steel mill in the outskirts, right by where the Blinky and Imi photo was taken. And we ran a program for 2 years and got an Andy Warhol Foundation grant to run it. And we were like, wow, this is somewhat sustainable. I mean, you're burning money all the time anyway being an artist. And then you get those grants, you're like, ah, let’s make some new t-shirts, or get some new spackle.
There's something about being familiar with everyone's work to make these things happen for me, that we should all be leading by example.
When I moved here, I've started doing this project called Garage and I've done a couple exhibitions. I'm going to be doing a lot more. It's tricky trying to find that balance between your own deadlines and other artists' needs. But I feel like whenever I have a landing pad of 3 months, I can usually get something done. And I think Tessa and I are going to be working on a project too for in the spring, which will be very inclusive and fun.
TG:
Yes, stay tuned. I want to leave time for questions, but I also want to mention tonight we're doing a film screening of Hal Ashby's film called Being There, which Jamie chose. As a gallery, I really like to incorporate films. I feel like it opens many doors of conversation and other ways to speak about visual artwork. I'd love to talk a little bit about why you chose this film, and I hope you all can make it later at Echoes.
JSP:
And if not, I have the DVD. Come knock on the door and I'll lend it to you. It's one of my favorites. I remember when I was at Mills for grad school, there was a Blockbuster, or a Hollywood Video, that you could walk to from campus. I'd walk there whenever there was a long weekend in the studio and get a couple movies. And I went through a phase of wanting to watch the Golden Age of cinema in the '70s Hollywood when there was low budget but so many talented directors and actors. Hal Ashby ended up being one of my favorite directors, and this is one of his seminal films about a gardener. The gardener has never left the grounds that he lives on, his caretaker passes away and they come to sell the house. Chicago at that time was being gentrified and urbanized. But he's never been outside of the garden walls. His only information about the world has been through television. And then he ends up on the streets of Chicago by himself. And he doesn't know really how to explain anything but taking care of his garden. He ends up in a political position because a politician hits him with his car and doesn't want anyone to know that he hit somebody. And he thinks he's a genius because he says things like, the garden needs water in order to succeed. And then he doesn't understand what making love is about. When someone has a crush on him and tries to seduce him, and he goes, I like to watch. I mean, it's like he’s a kid. But in the end, it's something I'm very interested in, in my work and just in art in general, film. There's, there's symbology and signs, and that can be what guides you to the next step. When we put our own needs on a sign, it can lead us down crazy rabbit holes. And I feel like this movie is really kind of about that. This person is a victim of their own circumstance, but also kind of brilliant.
TG:
He comes off very Buddhist.
On that note, I would love to open it up for questions.
Luc Sokolowski:
How do you see the relationship between your paintings and your sculptures? I almost see your sculptures in the paintings, but there's a complexity in your paintings that is in tension for me with the simplicity and the balance in your sculptures.
JSP:
That’s a great question. It’s something I don't even know if I fully know right now. Because I'm making a new body of work right now, and it's evolving from this. This is really my first time seeing the sculptures and the paintings in the same space. The first time I showed a painting was at Untitled last year for 3 days, so I wasn’t able to live with them. And that kind of complexity is hard to understand when it’s happening at that speed, I think, which leads to the title of the show too. For me, it's like I want to understand them when they're done. And I think painting is so much more that way.
The sculptures surprise me. But the painting really surprises me. Painting started for me almost as a game of telephone, like painting the paintings of the sculptures. And then I started thinking, well, if the sculpture can't do it on its own, why do I need to make a painting? Then I'm just elevating it and confusing it. But they’re separate things. And then I thought, well, actually the paintings are sculptures, the sculptures are paintings. And when I threw out those distinctions, it started making a lot more sense.
Also, my eyesight was compromised from my accident. I no longer have peripheral vision. I don't see 3-dimensionally. I see in stacked planes. So, the sculptures were, after drawing, the most immediate way for me to understand space. Pictorial space, actual space, just sheets stacked backwards so that I could hold it and navigate through it. After living with them for over a decade, the frontal plane is essentially a portal or the opening to a forest—it is inviting you in. I got to a point, where I wanted to see what the hell was inside of there. And I think that's what the painting is. It's once you take that step in, then it just becomes precarious, and it can expand and contract. I feel like each of these (sculptures) is an invitation into one of these (paintings).
Actually, when we were installing the show, I didn't expect to hang them all together, but it became abundantly clear that there was a motherboard or a whole map for the whole forest, and then these chapters that pop up.
I've been thinking about computer logic a lot and cartoon logic and how there are always screens within screens within screens within screens. And sometimes we're prepared to hop into that screen and sometimes we're not. Like, how do we make sure that we know how to get back out of it if we do? I can't really do that in the sculpture as much, but it's like this becomes a figure. Or becomes a container, which I've always seen them as a vessel, and that this is kind of maybe the offering of what sits inside of it.
Question 2:
Jamie, can you say a little bit about your color palette? Because it's very vibrant in some of them and then a little more muted. And also, do you work on multiple canvases at the same time?
JSP:
I've always really loved color and symbology and the connections between synesthesia and color to landscape, like codifying within color and light, because you're bringing form into the color and the light. I like thinking of color as DNA, essentially, or a sensation, a sound, like a color as a sound, a color as a place. And moving here, my work was much more, for lack of a better word, Southwestern in its palette. And living in the Mission in San Francisco and Santa Fe, there's a lot of similarities in some of those bursts of colors. But here it’s so tropical, so you can see that color in nature too. It's not just in signage and car paint. It's in everything. I feel like my palette really is depicted by where I'm working at that moment. It always has been. And I do work on multiples, all of it at once, which can get me in trouble. But I think that's an important kind of trouble to be in.
The framing is super specific too. I collect a lot of wood in my neighborhood where they are tearing down older bungalows, and I mill it down and try to work with just what I can salvage. I needed some more wood 2 days before the show, and there wasn’t any wood on the street because they’re starting to get stingy when they tear a house down. So, Texas Art Supply was selling old stretcher bars 50 cents or something and I realized I could mill those down. It’s proof that it's not sentimentality but rather it's really necessity and what you can get and how it speaks to you.
TG:
I also recognize this dark navy blue in the painting is in the base of that sculpture up there if you look closely. I feel like there's a lot of connection just because you started painting with oil paint.
JSP:
Yes, in January. But I also knew a lot about dying from working in clothing and indigo is important to me. I used to think things were tangential, but now it's making sense. I worked in Japanese fashion for about 8 years and got a great education in indigo and indigo sourcing. Sometimes I'll take the fabric of my jeans and hit that on that texture of the painting. What does that do? And then you put oil on that. It’s just curiosity.
Lauren Klotzman:
You mentioned synesthesia, and I wondered if you wanted to talk about sound and color and what sounds you have going on in your studio?
JSP:
That’s a great question. I actually usually work with a composer when I'm doing the show, and then they come and play the sound of what they think the work I'm making sounds like. It's a beautiful collaboration. And I wouldn't say it's music, but it's much more about tonality. Right before I got in the car accident, I was playing music more than I was making art, and then it flipped, and I couldn't hear pop music for about 2 years. My brain couldn't center around lyrics. But Brian Eno had just become very important, and I didn't know he had had head trauma and wanted things to just exist on the floor and absorb into walls and be non-confrontational. When I think about the music I listen to in the studio, it’s as much a part of the materiality as the paint as the weather.
TG:
And Robert Wyatt.
JSP:
Yeah, that was a trip. So I made that Robert Wyatt record piece at the beginning of me working again, and I was dealing with the senses. I couldn't read. I couldn't really listen to the music that I wanted to listen to. Or if I could, it became so specific that if I couldn't find it or I didn't have access to it— this was before Spotify. It would induce panic because you couldn’t remember if it was real or not real. I don't wish it on anyone. But that Robert Wyatt record was one of the ones I made.
And right before this show Tessa and I put together a playlist for Eric's radio show, and Tessa put a few songs from this Robert Wyatt record on the playlist.
TG:
Yeah, without knowing the significance of this album to Jamie or that this piece existed from 2010.
JSP:
When I originally showed that piece, a critic from Britain wrote about the show. He was in Oakland for the weekend, I don't remember what the occasion was, and he saw this storefront gallery, and he came in and that was there. And he wrote this review, he's like, never in Oakland did I think I'd find Robert Wyatt on a nighttime stroll. So, you just have to keep looking. And you kind of find where you're supposed to be.
Robert Wyatt has been a beacon. He's wheelchair-bound too. Some of the that were touchpoints or inspiration from this show—Larry Eigner, Robert Wyatt. People that have to go slow, sit looking out a window most of their life, and then use that limitation to create some of the most beautiful things I've ever heard or seen in my life. I think these kinds of people are paying attention when they have to say things.
TG:
Great, thank you, Jamie.