At the ‘art world Olympics,’ Team USA is chaotic

By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

The curator Jeffrey Uslip wants everyone to know that everything is normal.

“This is the smoothest exhibition I’ve curated in 30 years,” said Uslip, who has been working on the US Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2026 in Venice, which opens in two weeks.

Uslip was insistent on the point. “I also just want to be clear, because I know how people talk, it’s important to know that we have had complete artistic autonomy throughout this process,” he said by phone. Later, by email, he emphasized the process to select the artist — the sculptor Alma Allen — was “exactly the same” as it always was.

There’s a reason Uslip was adamant. Like so much touched by the Trump administration, this year’s US Pavilion, which is partly funded by the government, at the so-called “Olympics of the art world” — has been plagued by controversies and delays. For months, it was uncertain whether the State Department, whose Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs oversees the search, would select an artist to present in Venice at all.

For decades, the US has brought artists from Jasper Johns and Georgia O’Keeffe to Isamu Noguchi and Simone Leigh to the Venice Biennale, a 131-year-old international exhibition where, every two years, the world’s nations present ambitious contemporary art shows in architectural pavilions to visitors around the globe.

This time, the usual process was upended and new players empowered — including Allen, who has had a steady but quiet career, prompting a string of “Who is Alma Allen?” headlines when he was announced; Uslip, whose last major exhibition in the US ten years ago was marked by scandal and accusations of racial insensitivity; and pavilion commissioner Jenni Parido, a former pet supply shop owner organizing the show with her new nonprofit, the American Arts Conservancy. Not much is known about the group, aside from the fact that it is soliciting donations for the endeavor on its website.

No one knows quite what to expect this year, with extreme delays, including the fall government shutdown, resulting in just six months to fundraise and plan an exhibition that typically takes more than a year and millions of dollars to organize. It is complicated by the fact it is also coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, and has become part of a larger effort for President Trump to project an image of “American exceptionalism” through the arts.

Many in the art world have been watching — though often to rubberneck.

“This will certainly be taken up by historians,” said the contemporary art historian and Columbia University professor Alexander Alberro, who lectures on the Venice Biennale. “It is something that’s representative of the moment. It’s not an accident, given what’s happening elsewhere in the country.”

A motley crew

Exactly who selected Allen and Parido as artist and commissioner remains unclear.

That task has usually depended on the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) — which, like so much of the federal government, has been gutted by the Trump administration. The group normally convenes a federal advisory committee of leading curators, museum directors and other experts to vet applications and recommend the artist and its commissioner, which is typically a major museum or other arts nonprofit that organizes the show and fundraises the exorbitant costs. (The State Department provides $375,000, a third of which goes to facility upkeep).

Recent pavilions have been historic and widely celebrated firsts, including Leigh as the first Black woman to represent the US in 2022, and Jeffrey Gibson as the first Indigenous artist in 2024. This time, the application included new language that explicitly banned any diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — which most major museums have worked to emphasize in recent years.

This time, the State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which did not return CNN’s request for comment, directly selected the artist without the NEA, something the NEA said by email was a joint decision “driven by time constraints and staffing transitions.” The federal official who oversees the bureau is Darren Beattie, a former White House speechwriter who was fired during Trump’s first term for speaking at a conference attended by White nationalists. But another player who has emerged is Erin Scavino (née Elmore), a season-three contestant on Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” who runs the department’s Art in Embassies program and recently married President Trump’s deputy chief of staff.

The State Department blew past deadlines. The first effort to select a team — the curator John Ravenal and artist Robert Lazzarini — unraveled when the duo had to withdraw their winning bid after they couldn’t secure their institutional funding, Ravenal told The Washington Post.

Institutional funders of the US Pavilion are usually prominently promoted, but with the nascent American Arts Conservancy at the fundraising helm, it has been a mystery, and the AAC declined to share specifics with CNN. As its founder, Parido’s entry to the project is no less opaque, around three years following the closure of her pet supply store. Scavino and Parido appear to run in the same social circles — and share the same makeup artist, who thanked both of them for his recent White House visit that included a meeting with President Trump.

The State Department did not respond to inquiries into its selection process this year, nor the nature of Scavino and Parido’s relationship, though Scavino’s Arts in Embassies program has been advertising its partnership with the AAC. Puck reported that Scavino had a direct hand in this year’s selection, however, and “enlisted” Parido to form the AAC in order to organize the US Pavilion. That could potentially raise ethical questions, as federal officials are prohibited from using their positions to benefit personal connections. In an emailed statement, the AAC rejected the report as “reckless distortion built on baseless insinuations rather than verified facts.”

Earlier, Parido canceled a scheduled interview with CNN, and only partially answered emailed questions via the AAC’s publicist. She declined to comment on her relationship with Scavino, or whether Scavino was directly involved in the AAC’s founding. When asked about her relevant arts experience, she pointed to her interest in the arts since college.

She also did not explain how she became familiar with Uslip’s curatorial work, but said that she contacted him early in the development period. Being a new organization, she said, allowed them “to move with clarity and focus.”

Unconventional paths

While it is usually a badge of honor to represent the US in Venice, Allen has said that he lost both of his gallery reps for participating in the pavilion this year. Neither responded to a request for comment, and Allen also declined to be interviewed. Perrotin, a global mega-gallery that now represents him, says they were interested in representing him before his Biennale announcement.

“What Alma has been wanting to underline throughout is that he’s representing America and not the current administration,” said Rowena Chiu, director of Perrotin London. “He feels that people should be allowed to make and show work, without pledging to any particular ideology.”

The show at the US Pavilion, “Call Me the Breeze,” will feature a mix of new and existing work by Allen, who has been sculpting abstracted organic forms for three decades and has exhibited regularly with galleries, though he has only made rare appearances in museums — including participating in the Whitney Biennial in 2014. He’ll deal with themes of elevation in the show, and Uslip stresses Allen’s connection to the American landscape through his materials, including American walnut burl and white Colorado Yule marble, the latter of which has been used in US monuments including the Lincoln Memorial.

For the past ten years, Allen has worked from his foundry in Mexico, employing and training a staff of 15 to manage his studio and help create his sculptures — a process that combines computer assistance with hand carving — particularly as he’s developed carpal tunnel syndrome, Chiu explained.

“He will always do the last touches to ensure this very otherworldly tactility,” she said.

Allen is a self-taught artist who had “a very unintentional entrance to the art world,” Chiu said. He grew up in a large, religious Mormon family in Utah, experienced homelessness in New York, and sold small sculptures from found materials off an ironing board in SoHo in the 1990s that garnered him attention from designers Issey Miyake and Ted Muehling and the art dealer Jack Tilton, she explained. He has worked with form both conceptually and functionally, including furniture design. At the Whitney Biennial, he exhibited a series of improvisational sculptures, which the exhibition noted resembled the modernism of the pioneer Constantin Brâncuși.

“He was approaching form and thinking about wood carving very differently than how one would think about wood carving,” said the curator Michelle Grabner, who co-curated the biennial that year and worked closely with Allen. She sees his inclusion as putting “art first, form first, sculpture first,” and says that interpreting his works will be “hard work for audiences.”

On the curatorial side is Uslip, who first encountered Allen’s work at the Whitney, the same year that Uslip was appointed chief curator at CAM St. Louis. Two years later, he resigned from the post weeks following an uproar over an exhibition by the artist Kelley Walker featuring images of police violence against Black Civil Rights protesters smeared with white and dark chocolate. The exhibition, in a city where months of unrest followed the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson, became a local flashpoint that made national headlines. Museum staffers called for the removal of the works, and community members demanded answers at an artist talk with Walker and Uslip, which reportedly became hostile and led to public apologies from both parties, along with modifications to the show.

Uslip said he resigned to take a new post at The Bass in Miami, though he never made it there, which he said was because he chose to take time “to think more about art” and focus on his dissertation. (The Art Newspaper reported at the time that board members were infighting over The Bass’s offer).

Since then, Uslip has not taken a curatorial post or staged any major shows in the US, though he did curate the Malta Pavilion in Venice in 2022, giving him facility with the logistical side of things at the Biennale.

Between Parido, Uslip and Allen, none had ever met prior to their proposal for the US Pavilion. When clarifying the timeline over his first meeting with Allen — this March — Uslip bristled, saying they had had many conversations over Zoom.

“The reality is, I’ve seen nearly every exhibition Alma has ever made. For me, the work of art is the work of philosophy. I’m very well-versed,” Uslip said. “I’m the only American curator whose exhibition was nominated for a Turner Prize. Two of my exhibitions were top 10 of the year in Artforum. I am a very serious, well-researched curator. So coming to Alma was very specific.” (Uslip later clarified by email he was told verbally he has been the only American who has curated a Turner-nominated show — a prize designed to recognize British and Commonwealth artists. CNN could not independently verify that he has been the only American.)

Lingering questions

Whether the American Arts Conservancy can pull off the US Pavilion this year will be revealed when it opens next month. It’s “a steep learning curve” to fundraise, ship and stage the show in the famed, lagoon-based Italian city, as one former organizer of the pavilion explained.

The impact of a less-than-stellar showing from the US might prompt some eye-rolling and reduce its credibility, which the Columbia art historian Alberro noted it took “a long time to build.” The US’s first big moment at the Biennale only really came in 1964, when Robert Rauschenberg (controversially, to cries of rigging) became the first American to win the top prize as Abstract Expressionism drew the center of the art world from Paris to New York.

“A lot of administrations had to work very hard to cultivate the arts and have US art be considered something significant enough to feature on a on a grand scale,” Alberro said.

The pavilion isn’t just about the exhibition itself, but also performances, programs and educational initiatives throughout its run and beyond, which in recent years, have focused on expanding professional access within the arts for groups who face a higher barrier to entry. That has included the Leigh’s 2022 program focusing on curatorial initiatives for Black women and Gibson’s 2024 pavilion developing curriculum and gatherings based on Indigenous North American arts and culture.

In addition to its unclear funding, the AAC’s full plans for the pavilion remain unclear. The website for Allen’s pavilion is unusually light on details, featuring no information on programs or educational initiatives beyond the basics of the exhibition. Parido declined to share specifics, though she said by email that the exhibition will be supported “by a broader initiative focused on visual literacy” and that there will be events.

We may see more of Parido and the AAC as the US celebrates its semiquincentennial. The organization is purporting to mount an exhibition at the Art Museum of the Americas celebrating the milestone in July, though there is no information on its website about who or what is exhibiting or what specifics its public engagement will entail — nor has it released any concrete information about “Passport to Patriotism,” the children’s art sweepstakes for which it has been soliciting donations for several months.

Though the anniversary is an opportunity to share the full breadth of artmaking in the US, it is arriving at a time when the Trump administration is instead narrowing the power of American art, gutting its federal funding, leveraging its power over Smithsonian museums and scrutinizing exhibitions on race and identity.

Grabner, the curator who worked with Allen in 2014, sees this year’s deviations from the US Pavilion as “a shock to the traditional gatekeepers that this is a political move from the Trump administration.”

Still, she is a supporter of Allen’s work. “All of Trump’s administration around art and culture has been terribly problematic, but I do not want that to sully our relationship to art-making — in this case, an artistic practice that is evolving sculptural form,” she said.

“There is going to be a hard line between the politics, the context of how this work came to be in the American Pavilion, and what the work is,” she said. “So what you’re hearing from me is that we have to meet the work where the work is at.”

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