The Big Show 2025

Between Lines and Faces

I’ve been visiting Lawndale Art Center’s annual juried exhibit, The Big Show, since 2009, which was also the year I started writing about it. I’ve written posts about this event nine out of the past 15 years. (I missed last year’s Big Show because I was still recovering from open heart surgery.) I skipped the opening this year—The Big Show always has the most packed, uncomfortable openings of any big art exhibit in Houston year after year. After all, The Big Show is open to anyone within a 100 mile radius of Lawndale. This year there were 77 different artists in the show. Imagine all of them, all of their friends, and all of their family members packed into Lawndale. The mass of people who show up every year for The Big Show’s opening is always impressive. I feel hopeful about Houston’s art scene when I encounter a crowd of art lovers that large. But it also makes it impossible to view the art in a thoughtful way. So I waited until the day after the opening to check out 2025’s Big Show.

Every year Lawndale brings in an outside curator to be the juror. I usually don’t pay close attention to the curator, even though in a big group show like The Big Show, one would expect the tastes of the curator to be especially important to the overall flavor of the exhibit. Back in 1985, The Museum of Fine Arts mounted a huge exhibition of Houston artists called Fresh Paint. Thomas McEvilley wrote a review of it in Artforum that I have always remembered. He wrote, “The show is one in which the critic must review the curating before the work; the curating is so extravagant that the work can hardly be seen until one has blown away the cloud of claims that surround it.” I’ve mostly ignored the Big Show jurors in the past, but this time we have a curator, Dr. Phillip A. Townsend, who is making a “cloud of claims.” Townsend gives his edition of The Big Show a title, which is not something I recall happening in previous Big Shows. He calls it Between Lines and Faces. Townsend sees the exhibition as being about portraiture, text, and the mundane. Given these three elements, let’s look at some of the pieces in the show through that lens.