A Pet Food Entrepreneur And A Demand To ‘promote American Values’: Trump’s Cultural Offensive Hits The Venice Biennale

The United States is at the Venice Biennale with yet another example of Donald Trump’s cultural offensive: with an unexpected artist who was chosen after a fraught selection process, and with the pavilion in the hands of an individual with no experience in the art world but well-connected to the president’s inner circle. The major contemporary art event is itself also surrounded by political tensions sparked by the participation of Russia and Israel.

The artist chosen to represent the U.S. is Alma Allen, a 55-year-old who is virtually unknown in the art world, and who is presenting around 20 abstract sculptures made from natural materials. However, it is not his art, with its rather innocuous formalism, that has generated controversy, but rather the opaque selection process that brought him to the Italian city.

As it does every two years, the State Department organized an open call for artists aspiring to represent the U.S. at this Biennale, an honor typically reserved for creators with undeniable artistic recognition and maturity. However, this time, the Trump administration removed all references to values ​​such as diversity, inclusion, and equity from the open call, replacing them with a different requirement to “reflect and promote American values,” such as “innovation” and “exceptionalism.”

Against all odds, the chosen artist was this sculptor who was born into a Mormon family in Salt Lake City, and from which he broke away during his youth. Allen is a self-taught artist—the first one to represent his country in Venice—who went from selling wooden figurines on the streets of New York’s SoHo district to exhibiting in a group show at the Whitney Museum in 2014. Even so, to date he has only had one major retrospective, at the Palm Springs Art Museum in 2018. The sculptor greeted visitors on opening day Tuesday, reserved for professionals. There, he repeatedly told anyone who approached him: “I only represent myself.”

His exhibition, titled “Call Me the Breeze,” features abstract and biomorphic sculptures, centered on the use of materials such as cast bronze, American walnut, Mexican onyx, Guatemalan quartzite, Persian travertine, and Yule marble from Colorado, a white stone used in national monuments like the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The exhibition strives to present this variety of materials from diverse origins as a concentrated geology of the Americas, hinting at a possible Pan-Americanism. In fact, Allen has resided in Mexico since 2017, a circumstance that adds an irony to a story that is difficult to ignore: the official representative of the United States works on the other side of a border that Trump has made an emblem of his immigration policy.

In the open call, the Trump administration removed references to diversity and inclusion, replacing them with the requirement to “reflect and promote American values.”

His pieces resemble fossils, organs, animals or melted tools, in an ambiguity that lies at the heart of the artist’s practice: almost all the works are titled Not Yet Titled, as if he were keeping all meanings in suspense. While not disastrous, the exhibition is surprisingly unambitious, especially after the pavilions of artists Simone Leigh in 2022 and Jeffrey Gibson in 2024. Both radically transformed the neoclassical building and addressed the social and racial history of the United States.

Due to the U.S. government shutdown at the end of 2025, Allen didn’t begin working on his exhibition until last January. According to the US media, he wasn’t the first choice for the commission. His name was selected after more established artists, such as William Eggleston and Barbara Chase-Riboud, declined the invitation to avoid being associated with the Trump administration.

The name of Curtis Yarvin, a neo-reactionary ideologue close to the tech right, was also mentioned. He proposed turning the pavilion into a provocative Hall of Deplorables, a reference to the term Hillary Clinton used against Trump’s electorate in 2016, which has been reappropriated by MAGA culture. The project revolved around Titian’s The Rape of Europa, with the possibility of even using a forgery or an AI-generated recreation if the original couldn’t be loaned, according to Vanity Fair.

Allen’s pavilion is far less iconoclastic than that aborted project. In reality, the sculptor doesn’t fit the propagandistic profile some feared before the opening. It’s the team surrounding him that has generated doubts. The curator, Jeffrey Uslip, appears in the official documentation as a professional with nearly three decades of experience, associated with exhibitions of such prestigious artists as Mark Bradford, Lynda Benglis, and Agnes Denes. But it omits the fact that he carries with him a significant controversy. In 2016, when he was chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Saint Louis, Uslip organized an exhibition that included images of police violence against Black people and the bodies of African American women covered in chocolate and toothpaste. The show provoked protests, accusations of racial insensitivity, and calls for his resignation. Shortly afterward, Uslip left the museum.

However, the most striking figure on the team is Jenni Parido, head of the pavilion and president of the American Arts Conservancy, a non-profit organization created in 2025 to “preserve, promote, and advance” the visual arts in the United States. The American media has highlighted that, before taking the helm of the Venetian pavilion, Parido ran a high-end pet food company in Tampa, Florida. It has also been noted that she landed the job through Erin Scavino, head of the U.S. government’s Art in Embassy program and wife of Dan Scavino, a close associate of Trump. Furthermore, among the pavilion’s sponsors is John Phelan, Secretary of the Navy until two weeks ago, an art collector and well-known Republican donor.

Before taking charge of the Venetian pavilion, she ran a high-end pet food company in Florida. She was handpicked by the wife of a Trump associate.

The U.S. participation has been generating controversy for weeks. Artist Anish Kapoor called for the United States to be excluded from the Biennale, along with Russia and Israel, for its “abominable politics of hate” and its “relentless warmongering.” Robert Storr, former curator at MoMA and curator of the 2007 Venice Biennale, was equally harsh: “The U.S. will be remembered for having squandered a great opportunity to present serious work.” In contrast, French gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin, who signed Allen shortly after his selection, defended the artist: “People were ready to tear apart any artist who agreed to do the pavilion. It’s very unfair. Allen is a very nice person and doesn’t represent MAGA culture at all.”

In a biennial so deeply intertwined with politics, the proposal feels lukewarm or even evasive. The first reviews of the U.S. pavilion have been scathing. Artnews noted that Allen’s sculptures are “decorative objects” and summed up his disappointment with a brutal phrase: “An empty pavilion would be preferable,” while the art magazine Frieze pointed out that the exhibition says “nothing significant” and that the result is “embarrassing.” “They do not offend, except in their inertness,” The New York Times declared yesterday.

Alternative pavilion

In contrast to an official pavilion dominated by elusive abstraction, two African American artists, Lorna Simpson and Arthur Jafa, are proposing an alternative narrative of the United States in Venice. They are doing so in private foundations. Simpson is exhibiting at the Punta della Dogana, owned by magnate François Pinault, where she is revisiting two decades of work focused on the Black body. The first African American woman invited to the Venice Biennale, in 1990, she has also been a vocal critic of Trump. Meanwhile, Jafa is showcasing his work at the Prada Foundation, where he is presenting his feverish videos on Black subjugation and white supremacy.

The exhibition’s curator is Nancy Spector, who in 2007 brought the works of Félix González-Torres, a notorious critic of the establishment, to the U.S. pavilion during the final years of George W. Bush’s presidency. A possibility that today seems like science fiction. And which leaves one undeniable conclusion: at the Venice Biennale, the country is better represented outside its own pavilion.

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