An outsider artist takes the world’s biggest stage with the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

VENICE, Italy (AP) — U.S. artist Alma Allen had just months to prepare his exhibition for the Venice Biennale after a fraught selection process came down to the wire.

The self-taught sculptor from Utah who works in Mexico is keenly aware of his place as an outsider within the cliquey art world, and is bracing for the critical gaze as he takes one of the most prestigious stages in contemporary art.

A selection process that has been described as “opaque” has cast a shadow over the opening.

Institutions that typically vie for the coveted Biennale commission shied away out of apparent concern that they would be subjected to administration politics after the open call removed language focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion and replaced it with requirements to promote “American values.”

In a seemingly ironic act, Allen created a bronze evil eye to hang on the exterior of the brick, Jeffersonian-style U.S. Pavilion to ward off bad vibes, he joked. It is one of a dozen new pieces that he made for an exhibition that will likely be a defining moment in his 30-year career.

Just days before the Biennale’s opening on Saturday, the evil eye still had not arrived.

“This is really the first circumstance in my life as an artist where I felt the need to defend myself, or my work,’’ Allen told The Associated Press during a walk-through of the pavilion this week. He acknowledged that having lived outside the critical eye for the last three decades “has been actually a pleasure.”

The outsider artist

Allen makes biomorphic sculptures in wood, stone and bronze, and is reluctant to name them to give viewers “a moment of creation when they can decide what it is.”

The Biennale exhibition, titled “Call Me the Breeze,” includes works he made over the last 20 years, interspersed with new work. Alma said he chose the title to reflect his ability to get around obstacles.

“And that’s been my necessity and it’s also because of being self-taught and not having any institutional support very often in life,” he said.

The pavilion’s commissioner, Jeffrey Uslip, said Alma’s institutional independence was part of the appeal.

“I am deeply interested and invested in artists who are not, I guess, academicized … or lobotomized,’’ he said.

Lost and found commission

A prior proposal for artist Robert Lazzarini to stage the show, curated by art historian John Ravenal, fell apart in September, despite having secured U.S. State Department approval, after the project’s required institutional sponsor backed out, Ravenal told AP.

A U.S. State Department attempt to link the Lazzarini project to the newly formed American Arts Conservancy, failed, and a short time later the new project with the AAC as sponsor, Uslip as curator and Allen as artist was announced.

Uslip declined to discuss the selection process.

Ravenal called the process highly unusual, with no apparent committee vetting or application process, noting that the application deadline had expired in July.

“It’s really a loss of a 40-year history of open call and peer review,’’ Ravenal told AP by telephone, describing Allen as “a pawn in this whole thing.”

Allen is aware his willingness to mount the show has been the source of some backlash. But he insists that the Trump administration has not interfered with the show in any way.

“My art is not propaganda,” he said.

Wrong sheep, right moment

In the pavilion’s courtyard, a headless, and thus directionless, sheep stands as a self-portrait of Alma as an outsider. He described it as “a bit shunned because it’s the wrong sheep.”

His most recent work includes bronze wall sculptures that he treats with chemicals in a form of painting, treating the hard metal “as an instantaneous material, like watercolor,’’ he said.

Alma’s journey to the Biennale included a period of homelessness in New York City when he sold his creations from atop an ironing board, a move of admitted desperation that soft-launched his artistic career, establishing his first collectors.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Palm Springs Art Museum own pieces of Allen’s work, and he participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. He made his European debut in Brussels in 2022.

After getting the Biennale commission, he made his first trip ever to Venice in November to view the U.S. Pavilion, a neoclassic brick building built around a courtyard and rotunda. A painting by Hieronymus Bosch titled “The Visions of Hereafter” at Venice’s Accademia depicting heaven, hell and purgatory inspired the show’s organizing principle.

“I wanted there to be a bit of the chaos that we go through,” he said.

Beyond his body of work, Allen attributes his selection to the fact that “I’m just ready to do things at the last minute” and accept challenges as they come.

“When they do, I’m prepared to try it, and fail at it. That’s fine,” he said.