Alma Allen to Represent US at 2026 Venice Biennale

Sculptor Alma Allen will represent the US at the 2026 Venice Biennale with "Call Me the Breeze." The exhibit highlights Allen's material transformations and the concept of 'elevation'.

A state division news makes clear that Allen’s exhibit will straighten with US head of state Donald Trump’s “America initially” ideology, stating: “It will present artworks that highlight Allen’s alchemical transformation of matter and discover the concept of ‘elevation’, both as a physical symptom of type and as a symbol of collective positive outlook and self-realization, enhancing the Trump Management’s concentrate on showcasing American excellence.”

Allen’s Venice Biennale Exhibition

Validating earlier records that his choice had actually been delayed by the 43-day United States federal government closure, the United States State Department on Monday (24 November) validated that the Utah-born, Mexico-based sculptor Alma Allen will certainly represent the United States at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Allen’s United States Pavilion exhibition, Alma Allen: Call Me the Breeze (9 May-22 November 2026), is being organised by Jenni Pardo, the pavilion’s commissioner and the founder of the organisation American Arts Conservancy, and the independent curator Jeffrey Uslip.

Before his option to stand for the US in Venice (after a previous proposal entailing the sculptor Robert Lazzarini reportedly broke down), Allen had a top-level public art installment along Park Avenue in Manhattan last springtime. He was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and has actually revealed at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut and the Museo Anahuacalli in Mexico City. His works are in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Palm Springs Art Museum.

Sculptural Style and Materials

The artist’s event will certainly be anchored by his hallmark massive sculptures, in which materials like wood, marble, volcanic rock and bronze are treated with different age-old and sophisticated procedures to stimulate contrasting products. “The sculptures are typically in the act of doing something: they are going away, or leaving or connecting with something undetectable,” Allen claimed in a statement.

Allen, who is based in Tepoztlán, Mexico, was previously represented by Kasmin, though since that gallery has closed he does not appear to presently have official representation. Olney Gleason, the gallery developed by some graduates of Kasmin, does not include him on its roster. He informed The New York Times that he had actually previously been represented by Olney Gleason and the Brazilian gallery Mendes Timber DM, however that both dropped him after he accepted the US Pavilion invitation.

“Alma Allen’s signature sculptural vocabulary brings the art historical legacies of biomorphism into our present; Allen’s job features as sculptural ciphers: each sculpture, emphatically Not Yet Labelled, remains in a theoretical state of coming to be,” Uslip said in a declaration (focus his). “Alma Allen has invested the last three decades creating kinds that are sculpturally fascinating and materially based in the landscape of the Americas.”