The Venice Biennale’s US Pavilion Was Supposed to Say Something About America. It Didn’t

Every two years, nearly 100 countries send their best artists to the Venice Biennale, sometimes called the Olympics of art. It’s cultural diplomacy dressed up as art—a chance for each nation to make a statement to the world about who they are. I am by no means an art expert; the closest I’ve come to curation is deciding which of my kids’ sketches goes on the fridge. But as someone who happened to be passing through the Italian city on a family vacation, I was curious to see what the rest of the world might be taking away about America from the US exhibit. By now, a lot has been written about how the US artist was chosen. Normally, the artist is selected by a panel of experts from the National Endowment for the Arts. This year, President Donald Trump’s State Department took over the process, handing the US pavilion to a new nonprofit run by Jenni Parido, who has no professional museum experience and whose last job was running a luxury pet food store in Tampa, Florida. Another figure reportedly weighing in on the search was Erin Scavino, the State Department’s director of art in embassies and a former Apprentice contestant married to Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino. The Trump administration also issued new guidelines requiring that artwork must “reflect and promote American values” and “counter negative stereotypes.” The new language also barred anything associated with DEI. This marked a sharp turn from the last callout, which had listed “support of Equity and Underserved Communities” as one of its core selection criteria. The most recent US pavilions featured work from Simone Leigh, the first Black woman to represent the US, in 2022 and Jeffrey Gibson, the first solo US Indigenous artist, in 2024. The selection process ultimately produced Alma Allen’s exhibit “Call Me the Breeze,” featuring about two dozen stone, wood, and bronze sculptures, most of which are labeled “Not Yet Titled.” The art world’s answer to “what values are on display” was pretty much…not many. The New York Times found that the sculptures “present some modest technical facility but no great thought” and “look fine enough for a South Beach hotel lobby.” A critic for The Atlantic commented that the show made them feel like they’d “finished a puzzle that mocked me for solving it.” Hyperallergic highlighted one particular sculpture as a favorite piece because it reminded the writer of a portal, “something to zap me into a better US pavilion in a parallel universe.” Now, I don’t mean to beat up on Allen. He’s just a sculptor who got an incredible chance to show his work on one of the world’s most prestigious stages. In the end, the art never answered my question about what American values are being reflected and promoted. The US government did—not through the exhibit, but through everything it did to avoid saying anything at all.