Who is Alma Allen, Trump's Pick for the Venice Biennale?
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.”
Born and raised in Heber 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.
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 the Whitney 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.
Allen 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.
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.
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.”
