Venice Biennale opening in Venice on May 9, the U.S. Pavilion is finally moving from uncertainty to installation: La Biennale’s national participations list now names Alma Allen as exhibitor, Jeffrey Uslip as curator and Call Me the Breeze as the official American presentation in the Giardini. But instead of arriving as a straightforward national showcase, the pavilion is nearing opening as one of the most contested stories of this year’s exhibition, after months of delays, criticism and a selection process that many in the art world still regard as unusually opaque.
On paper, the project is clear enough. In the official announcement from the American Arts Conservancy, Allen’s show is described as a presentation of new and existing biomorphic sculptures exploring “elevation,” including a site-responsive work for the pavilion forecourt. That material focus may yet give the U.S. a visually commanding entry. The harder question is whether the work can eclipse the process that produced it.
Why the Venice Biennale U.S. Pavilion is still under scrutiny
The policy framing of the pavilion also shifted. The State Department’s biennale program statement describes the initiative as a vehicle for advancing “American values,” language that landed very differently from the tone surrounding recent U.S. pavilions. Combined with the delayed rollout of the 2025 call, it left many curators and artists reading the process as both ideologically narrower and operationally riskier.
That concern had been building in public for months. In May 2025, Vanity Fair reported that the United States still had not opened its application process even though the Biennale was a year away, prompting fears that the country could miss its normal timetable. Then, in November, The Washington Post reported that artist Robert Lazzarini had actually been selected before that plan collapsed during contract negotiations tied to fundraising and liability, turning what had already looked delayed into something closer to a breakdown.
How the Venice Biennale story shifted to Alma Allen
Allen’s late-November arrival did not reset the conversation so much as redirect it. When his appointment became public, Hyperallergic reported that Allen said two galleries had dropped him after he accepted the commission, a sign that the backlash was not only institutional but personal. Critics also focused on the role of the newly formed American Arts Conservancy, which had quickly moved from obscurity to the center of the country’s most visible art-diplomacy platform.
Even now, with opening week close, the story of who did not take the job is still hanging over the pavilion. This week, Hyperallergic reported that Barbara Chase-Riboud had spoken publicly about declining the U.S. invitation, saying it was “not the moment,” after earlier reports that William Eggleston had also passed. That detail matters because it reinforces the sense that the American entry was assembled through a shifting chain of refusals, reversals and late substitutions rather than the steadier institutional pipeline that usually delivers the U.S. Pavilion to Venice.
What the Venice Biennale opening may change
Allen still has an opportunity to change the tenor of the conversation once viewers are standing inside the pavilion. His sculpture — materially dense, organic and intentionally resistant to overt messaging — is far removed from the bureaucratic language and political signaling that helped define the selection saga. If Call Me the Breeze lands on its own terms, the pavilion could still recover some of the authority the process eroded.
But that is the challenge facing the U.S. entry as the Venice Biennale approaches: the art is finally arriving, yet it is arriving after a year in which the mechanism of selection repeatedly overshadowed the work itself. For Allen, the opening is not just a debut. It is the first real chance to move the American pavilion away from process and back toward sculpture.
