Alma Allen’s Pick as America’s Venice Biennale Rep Is Deeply Sad

A dispiriting selection process for the United States Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale has reached its appropriately dispiriting conclusion: Alma Allen, a sculptor known for his sleek, abstract sculptures, will represent America on the country’s 250th anniversary, as previously reported by ARTnews and confirmed today. This is disappointing, not because Allen’s work is bad (there are plenty of worse choices), but because the work has nothing to say about the state of our country at the moment .

Perhaps this isn’t surprising. The US State Department runs the proposal process, so no one would expect a pavilion about crackdowns on migrant communities, rampant racism and transphobia, isolationist economics, censorship of the arts and the press, and a President who has been credibly accused of being a fascist. Besides, the US Pavilion has always tended to showcase work that’s aesthetically inoffensive (on its surface, anyway). And the newly created nonprofit body responsible for funding the pavilion—the American Arts Conservancy—appears to be stocked with Trump allies.

But consider some US pavilions of the recent past, and a veiled (and, sometimes, not so veiled) critique of American ideals does often emerge. In 2022, Simone Leigh covered her pavilion’s facade in thatch—the same material that adorned the African pavilions at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, where objects from the continent were put on show for a bourgeois European audience. She was situating the US within a larger history of colonialism and empire that continues to this day.

In 2019, Martin Puryear addressed the legacy of slavery in the US with works such as A Column for Sally Hemings (2019), which paid homage to the enslaved woman who lived on Thomas Jefferson’s estate and may have borne some of his children. Jefferson’s Monticello plantation was designed using the Neoclassical style—just like the US Pavilion itself. Puryear’s pavilion was staged during the first Trump administration. Realizing it now, during a second Trump administration, seems virtually unthinkable.

Both Leigh and Puryear’s projects dealt with what the US and its pavilion symbolize at the world’s greatest art exhibition. That isn’t entirely abnormal for any nation’s contribution to the Venice Biennale. France’s 2019 representative, Laure Prouvost, dug a tunnel between the French Pavilion and the British Pavilion, in what was widely read as a commentary on Brexit. Germany has a reputation for picking artists for their ability to meditate on its pavilion’s Nazi-era structure; the country’s 2024 pavilion saw Ersan Mondtag plop a mound of dirt in front of the building, presumably with the hope of at once defiling and occluding its ugly history.

All these gestures imply a confrontation with the hideousness of the past. Will Allen enact a similar encounter with the ugly parts of US history? The details of his pavilion remain unknown, but it’s unlikely that we’ll find anything so provocative in the artworks that will be shown.

Allen’s sculptures tend to take the form of blobby pieces of marble and wood that the Mexico-based artist carves both by hand and with the help of digital technology. (In 2014, the year he appeared in the Whitney Biennial, he said in an interview with T: The New York Times Style Magazine that he “may be the only sculptor in the U.S. with his own robot.”) In spirit and in form, these sculptures have a lot in common with the art of Constantin Brâncuși, the Romanian-born modernist who famously conjured a bird from an arcing bit of marble in 1928.

If prior articles are any indication, Allen himself is reticent on the content of his art. The text accompanying his Whitney Biennial works was anodyne, praising his “beguiling” sculptures for their “impeccable sense of material and form.” (Impeccable is debatable, if you ask me, given that there’s better formalist art out there.) Allen often gives his sculptures the intentionally evasive name of Not Yet Titled; he has said that he wants his work to appear very old, even though it often looks quite new. Earlier this year, when he showed twists of onyx resembling seashells and a loop of bronze along Park Avenue in Manhattan, he made a remark to Elle Decor that comes perilously close to the very definition of conservatism: “I’ve never understood seeing a separation between the ancient and the modern.”

Things could have gone in a very different direction for the American pavilion. Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that Robert Lazzarini had been picked before his show came apart due to what the artist described as “two bureaucracies failing to mesh.” Lazzarini’s pavilion would’ve included a sculpture of George Washington and several American flags, all of which the artist would’ve rendered to look as though they had been digitally warped. In his application, John Ravenal, the proposed pavilion’s curator, described a “need for an artistic project that does more than just showcase talent—it must encourage critical engagement with American symbols and ideals in a time of great change.”

That the proposal managed to be approved by the State Department attested to its ability to thread the needle. As Vanity Fair reported over the summer, the application guidelines this year dropped language about diversity in favor of a new note that called for a pavilion with a “non-political character,” one that is “representative of the diplomacy of American political, social, and cultural life.” (Allen’s art fulfills that edict, I guess. It’s probably worth noting that he will be the first white male to represent the US in Venice since 2009.) Ravenal told ARTnews that he and Lazzarini “were … very interested in [whether it was] possible, given the revised guidelines, to create a proposal that both obtains State Department approval, and is thoughtful and nuanced contemporary art… And we were pleased to find that that was possible.”

To my mind, Lazzarini is not in the league of past US representatives in Venice, which include Jasper Johns, Louise Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Colescott, Ed Ruscha, Jeffrey Gibson, and Robert Rauschenberg, who became the first American to win the Golden Lion in 1964 for works such as Tree Frog, a painting that featured a silkscreened Statue of Liberty. (Rauschenberg’s victory may have been rigged, for what it’s worth.) But based on the pictures of Lazzarini’s proposed pavilion that appeared in the Post story, I’m sure his pavilion would’ve at least met the moment. Allen’s likely won’t.