The Big Show 2024 Juried by Laura Augusta, PhD

The Big Show is an ambitious open-call juried competition of artists practicing within a 100-mile radius of Lawndale that reflects our commitment to supporting local and regional artists at various stages in their career.

Submissions are free and open through April 4, 2024 at 11:59 PM (CST). Click here to learn more and apply.

Laura Augusta, PhD, is a U.S.-born curator and writer who has worked between the U.S. and Central America since 2014. Her curatorial/essay projects connect the landscapes of disaster-prone cities, thinking specifically about floods and muddiness, shared space, and everyday forms of resistance; her writing about contemporary art in Guatemala City was awarded The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2017. Augusta completed the Core Fellowship at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2016-2018), and was an inaugural Mellon Arts + Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration in 2021. She currently works with the Archives of American Art’s Oral History Project collecting the art histories of artist elders, and is a consultant for American Art Journal’s landmark program Toward Equity in Publishing. As an independent curator, she curated more than 20 exhibitions at museums, university galleries, and artist-run spaces across the U.S. and Central America from 2015 to 2022 before being hired as Curator at the Gerald & Stanlee Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso. Located less than a quarter mile from the U.S.-Mexico border, the Rubin Center serves one of the largest binational urban environments in the world and remains the only dedicated contemporary art museum in the El Paso / Ciudad Juárez region. In 2023, Augusta launched a Central American exhibition series at the Rubin, one of the first university galleries in the U.S. to make a multi-year commitment to the region.