Call Me the Breeze

Opens Saturday, May 9 The American Arts Conservancy, is pleased to announce that Alma Allen will represent the United States at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2026. Over the past three decades, Allen has created abstract biomorphic sculptures inspired by the expansive landscapes and natural geological formations of the Americas, using natural materials sourced from these lands. His exhibition at the United States Pavilion in Venice, Italy, will present artworks that highlight Allen’s alchemical transformation of matter and explore the concept of “elevation,” both as a physical manifestation of form and as a symbol of collective optimism and self-realization. The artist will create several new site-responsive sculptures, including one for the Pavilion’s outdoor forecourt. To make his work, Allen developed a hybrid process that combines preindustrial methods of carving and hand-shaping with advanced technology, such as robotic sculpting. With a commitment to material authenticity, he works in materials local to the Americas, including American walnut burl; Cantera verde volcanic rock; and white Colorado Yule marble, a luminous stone used to construct several of our nation’s historic monuments, including the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. Natural materials carry historical and cultural imports; Yule marble, for example, signifies historical gravity and transcendence and can be used to foster understanding and to open a metaphorical pathway for the future. With these natural, earthbound materials as a starting point, Allen has built a body of sculptures that seem to transform the nature of matter. In Alma Allen: Call Me the Breeze, viewers will encounter works in which the strata of rough rock appear to have been smoothed through the passage of time, and solid bronze appears liquid. For Allen, “The sculptures are often in the act of doing something: They are going away, or leaving, or interacting with something invisible. Even though they seem static as objects, they are not static in my mind. In my mind, they are part of a much larger universe.” The U.S. Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia will coincide with “America250,” the United States Semiquincentennial celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The 2026 U.S. Pavilion is organized by Commissioner Jenni Parido, founder of the American Arts Conservancy and U.S. curator Jeffrey Uslip. “Alma Allen’s signature sculptural vocabulary brings the art historical legacies of biomorphism into our present; Allen’s work functions as sculptural ciphers: each sculpture, decisively Not Yet Titled, is in a conceptual state of becoming” said Uslip. “Alma Allen has spent the last thirty years creating forms that are sculpturally captivating and materially grounded in the landscape of the Americas. As the exhibition’s title, Call Me the Breeze, suggests, Allen’s sculptures embrace a weightlessness and freedom of thought.” Alma Allen (b. 1970, Salt Lake City, UT) works in a wide range of materials, including bronze, parota wood, various types of marble, obsidian, and stalagmite. His sculptures retain a strikingly unique energy and original aesthetic. From sinuously thin bronze shapes to magmatic and smooth marble outpourings, Allen’s biomorphic forms seem to rise up effortlessly from the artist’s chosen material. Allen’s artistic trajectory has seen him progress from humble origins, selling hand-carved miniatures on the streets of SoHo in New York City, to his breakthrough moment of recognition after his acclaimed presentation at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Reflecting a largely self-taught background, the spontaneity and energy of Allen’s work seem to bear little connection to the artistic movements of his time. In fact, they have more in common, formally and perhaps spiritually, with the vast expanses of territory and the monolithic natural formations that have informed his life: Utah, where he was born and raised; Joshua Tree, California, where he lived for several years; and Tepoztlán, Mexico, where his studio is currently located. Rocks, branches, and unspecified biomorphic entities exude an almost prehistoric energy, their size and mass undermined by their apparent levity and effortless presence. Allen’s work has been exhibited in numerous international museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; and the Museo Anahuacalli, Mexico City. Most recently, the artist was awarded the Park Avenue sculpture exhibition in New York City by the Sculpture Committee of the Fund for Park Avenue and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation’s Art in the Parks program. Alma Allen’s work is in the permanent collections of several public institutions, among them the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Palm Springs Art Museum in California. Commissioner: The American Arts Conservancy Curator: Jeffrey Uslip