Lawndale Art Center in Houston has announced a deadline extension for the Big Show, its annual exhibition of new work by artists practicing within a 100-mile radius of Lawndale. Lawndale, like other art spaces, has been closed to the public since early March due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The new deadline for entries fort the Big Show is May 15, 2020, at 11:59 PM.
Upcoming exhibitions at Lawndale, featuring Jennifer May Reiland and the 2019-21 Artist Studio Program artists, originally scheduled for May 15, have been moved to the 2020-2021 exhibition season. Lawndale’s 2019-21 Artist Studio Program participants will continue their residency into 2021, and the application process for 2020-2021 will be pushed to 2021-2022.
Via Lawndale: “While we look forward to re-opening the galleries with our current exhibitions for a limited run, we are not yet sure when this can happen safely. In the meantime, we continue to explore new ways of amplifying the powerful role that art and artists play in the world.”
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill is still in place as juror for the Big Show 2020. Fajardo-Hill, a British-Venezuelan art historian and curator based in Southern California, holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Essex, England, and an MA in 20th-Century Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, England. Her projects include (as co-curator) the upcoming touring exhibition XicanXperimental for Phoenix Museum in 2021, and a stint as Fellowship Visiting Research Scholar in the Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS) and Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University. Fajardo-Hill is the editor of Remains – Tomorrow: Themes in Contemporary Latin American Abstraction, on post-’90s abstraction in Latin America, and the co-editor of two books on 20th- and 21st-century Guatemalan art.
Glasstire’s Brandon Zech wrote about the 2017 Big Show, which differed from previous years in that it was juried by an at-the-time local curator, the Menil’s Toby Kamps (he’s since left Houston), and featured some very established Houston-area artists who were invited by Mr. Kamps to apply. (In 2019, Lawndale skipped the Big Show). Zech went on to quote Michael Bise, who wrote about the Big Show that year:
“Kamps specifically reached out to a number of well-known Houston artists and encouraged them to view the Big Show not as a venue reserved for emergent unknowns, but as a kind of snapshot of the Houston art scene now — a cutaway revealing the complex strata of people and practices that make up the world of art in the rapidly growing city of Houston and its surrounding areas.”
To apply to the Big Show 2020, please follow the link here.
