Alma Allen Says Venice Backlash Is Worth the Pressure
When Alma Allen (b. 1970) was asked to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, he did not hesitate. Speaking in an interview recorded at his home in Tepotzlán, Mexico, the self-taught Utah artist said curator Jeffrey Uslip invited him last fall, and he immediately recognized the scale of the opportunity. “I was not going to turn down something so interesting,” he said.
That decision has come with a cost. Allen’s appointment arrived at a moment when the U.S. pavilion had become unusually fraught, after the State Department required proposals to reflect and promote American values while not promoting DEI initiatives. Several artists reportedly declined the role under those conditions, including William Eggleston and Barbara Chase-Riboud. Allen said the reaction to his acceptance has been “a little stressful,” and his former galleries, Mendes Wood and Olney Gleason, asked him not to take the commission before dropping him. He has since joined Perrotin.
The controversy has also sharpened attention on Allen’s position in the art world. Though he has shown in the Whitney Biennial and at galleries including Blum & Poe, he has often been described as an outsider relative to recent U.S. representatives such as Jeffery Gibson and Simone Leigh. Allen, however, framed the situation less as a referendum on status than on perception. “It’s fascinating having a complicated situation, a little pressure on people,” he said, adding that some of his work is about conflict.
His Venice presentation, titled “Call Me the Breeze,” will extend that tension into the pavilion itself. Allen said one work is a portrait of his daughter, and two others were inspired by her interest in Pokémon. More broadly, his abstract, biomorphic sculptures have long drawn on the ancient and Native American art forms he encountered growing up in Utah, where he searched the red-rock hills for cave paintings and petroglyphs. In Venice, that personal lineage will meet one of the most politically charged stages in contemporary art.
