Alma Allen, a largely self-taught sculptor born in Utah and now based in Mexico, has been confirmed as the United States’ official representative for the 61st Venice Biennale, in a move that caps weeks of speculation and controversy around the Trump administration’s cultural agenda. The artist will present the exhibition “Alma Allen: Call Me the Breeze” at the U.S. Pavilion in 2026, featuring around 30 sculptures curated by Jeffrey Uslip and commissioned by the newly formed American Arts Conservancy.
An unusual appointment
Allen’s selection follows a chaotic and delayed process that included the withdrawal of an earlier approved proposal by artist Robert Lazzarini and disruption linked to a prolonged U.S. government shutdown. This year, the National Endowment for the Arts did not run its usual competition, leaving the choice effectively to the State Department under President Donald Trump’s tightened cultural guidelines.
The commissioning body is not a major museum but the American Arts Conservancy, a Florida-based nonprofit founded only this year, which will organize the exhibition and raise most of its funding. The State Department framed Allen’s pavilion as part of an effort to “showcase American excellence,” with a brief emphasizing works that reflect “American values” and explicitly excluding initiatives framed around diversity, equity, and inclusion.
A sculptor outside the mainstream
Born in 1970 to a large Mormon family in Heber City, Utah, Allen began carving stone and wood as a teenager and left home at 16, moving through periods of homelessness and casual labour before eventually settling into a sculptural practice. After time in the Bay Area and New York, he built a studio in Joshua Tree, California, later relocating to Tepotzlán, Mexico, where he now lives and works.
Allen is best known for highly polished, biomorphic forms carved from foraged stone and wood or cast in bronze, ranging from small amulets to multi-ton outdoor works that appear to hover between abstraction and figuration. His profile within the institutional art world remains modest: apart from inclusion in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, he has had only a handful of museum presentations, including solo shows at Museo Anahuacalli in Mexico City and the Van Buuren Museum & Gardens in Brussels.
Venice plans and political backdrop
At Venice, Allen will install new “site-responsive” sculptures inside and outside the U.S. Pavilion, exploring what the State Department describes as the “alchemical transformation of matter” and the idea of “elevation” as both a formal and symbolic principle. The show is expected to mix recent and earlier works, with at least one major piece planned for the pavilion’s forecourt.
The appointment has intensified debate over the politicisation of U.S. cultural representation abroad under Trump, following the introduction of requirements that publicly backed art projects avoid DEI-oriented language while affirming national “exceptionalism.” Allen himself has noted that his work is often read as abstract or apolitical, even as it is rooted in a personal history of precarity, accident, and physical strain that led him to adopt robotic tools to scale up his sculptures.
A divided art-world response
The choice has been received as both a surprise and a signal: critics point to Allen’s relatively sparse museum record compared with previous U.S. representatives, while supporters highlight his long development outside institutional circuits. The decision has also strained professional relationships; Allen has said that two of his former galleries urged him to turn down the commission and dropped him after he accepted.
For the 61st Venice Biennale, opening in April 2026, Allen’s pavilion will be closely watched as a test of how far U.S. cultural diplomacy under Trump can bend the biennale’s long-standing expectations—and how a sculptor long working on the margins will navigate sudden visibility on one of the art world’s biggest stages.
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
