Following a fraught selection cycle, the US Department of State on Monday confirmed that Utah-born, Mexico-based sculptor Alma Allen will represent the United States at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
The prestigious exhibition opens next May, when scores of curators, collectors, and journalists descend on the lagoon city to judge not only the quality of art on display, but the politics communicated by each national pavilion at the world’s top international art event.
In the context of the ideological re-weaving of arts and culture under President Trump, the choice of the US representative offers a prism through which to read his priorities, especially when this year’s guidelines were updated to include that proposals should “advance international understanding of American values by exposing foreign audiences to innovative and compelling works of art that reflect and promote American values.”
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Who is Alma Allen?
Born and raised in Herber City, Utah, in 1970, Allen lived for several years in Joshua Tree, California; and Tepoztlán, roughly 50 miles from Mexico City, where he has a studio complete with a bronze foundry.
What kind of art does he make?
He makes sculptures that take on abstract, biomorphic forms. His presentation at the 2014 Whitney Biennale resembled primordial oceanic organisms, though elsewhere he favors shapes that evoke the woodlands. Largely self-taught, he employs a wide-range of production techniques, from hand-carvings to robotic-assisted fabrication when the scale calls for it.
His former gallery Mendes Woods DM described his trajectory as rising from his “humble origins, selling hand-carved miniatures on the street in Soho,” to his career breakthrough, being included in. theWhitney Biennial. Like much of his oeuvre, the sculptures he exhibited there were formally simple but metaphorically opaque. “Spontaneous” and “compulsory” are used often in press materials to describe his approach to sculpting.
He seemingly fits squarely with Trump’s preferred aesthetics: His sculptures lack human form, gleam like precious metal, and the signature scale is monumental. And for a president preoccupied with industry, it surely helps that in this practice the materials is as meaningful as the final product; he’s worked in sinewy bronze, Parota wood, obsidian and stalagmite, and a type of marble native to the Mexican city of Orizaba.
What are his bona fides?
Allen has exhibited extensively since the early 1990s, with his New York debut in a group show at Charles Cowles Gallery, and CV that spans Los Angeles to Aspen, and Tokyo. The majority of his solo exhibitions have been at commercial galleries: Blum & Poe and later Blum; Mendes Wood DM; and Kasmin (now Olney Gleason). Blum closed earlier this year, and Allen told the New York Times that Mendes Wood DM and Olney Gleason encouraged the artist not to accept the US Pavilion commission; when he did, they cut ties with him.
Mendes Wood DM presented his first solo exhibition in Europe in 2021, at the gallery’s Brussels space and the city’s Van Buuren Museum & Gardens. The show included coiled, oily forms inspired but clearly not from our world. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Palm Springs Art Museum in California, and his first monograph was published by Rizzoli Electa in 2020. He has had two institutional solo shows across his career, at the Palm Springs Art Museum in 2018 and the Museo Anahuacalli in Mexico City in 2023.
How was he selected to represent the United States?
Allen told the New York Times that he had not submitted a formal proposal the biennale commission and instead was approached directly with the offer by Jeffrey Uslip, who was tapped to curate the US presentation in Venice. The artist and curator had reportedly never met before, though Allen said he accepted the offer promptly. (Uslip is currently independent; he curated the Malta Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. He resigned from the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2016, where he was chief curator, amid a controversy over a Kelley Walker show.)
ARTnews first reported that Allen had been selected as the winning artist earlier this month, but that the announcement was delayed by the government shutdown. That same day, the Washington Post reported that artist Robert Lazzarini, working with independent curator John Ravenal and University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum, had initially been chosen, but that when negotiations between the State Department and USF collapsed, their proposal was withdrawn.
It marked an unorthodox end to an unprecedented selection cycle. For a time, it was unclear whether the American Pavilion would even proceed at all in 2026, as the Trump administration has continued to overhaul federal agencies related to arts and culture, including to the National Endowment for the Arts. The sense of instability was compounded by the looming—and ultimately realized—threat of a government shutdown.
Traditionally for each Venice Biennale, the US Pavilion artist is selected through a call for proposals reviewed by the Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions, which is assembled by the National Endowment for the Arts and US Department of State and State Department. Given the Herculean undertaking of mounting a national pavilion, the grant process typically begins about 18 months ahead of the opening. The National Endowment for the Arts issues a federal notice to convene committee, which then evaluates the submitted proposals several months later.
That portal did not open until this past May, or almost exactly a year before the exhibition was to open in Venice, a notoriously difficult city in which to mount an exhibition. When the portal for the State Department was open, it included not just the directive to “reflect and promote American values” but also eliminated previous language that gestured to the administration’s new directives against art that engaged with DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). Those wishing to participate were ordered to prove “compliance in all respects with all applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws” and cannot “operate any programs promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that violate any applicable anti-discrimination laws.”
What do we know about his US Pavilion?
Allen’s pavilion exhibition, titled “Alma Allen: Call Me the Breeze,” is curated by Uslip, former deputy director of exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. The pavilion’s commissioner is Jenni Pardo, the founder of the Trump-aligned American Arts Conservancy.
The Venice exhibition will feature roughly 30 sculptures, including “site-responsive” sculptures that, according to the State Department, will “explore the concept of ‘elevation’ … as a physical manifestation of form and as a symbol of collective optimism and self-realization, furthering the Trump Administration’s focus on showcasing American excellence.” At least one of these will be installed outdoors, in the American Pavilion forecourt.
“The sculptures are often in the act of doing something: they are going away, or leaving or interacting with something invisible,” Allen said in a statement. “Even though they seem static as objects, they are not static in my mind. In my mind, they are part of a much larger universe.”
Parido added: “Alma Allen embodies the qualities of America’s best and brightest; he is a self-taught American success story.”