Portrait of Alma Allen. Photo by Ana Hop. Courtesy of the American Arts Conservancy.

With a name like Alma, you knew he had to be Mormon. Not necessarily a Utahn, not necessarily LDS, but definitely Mormon. Anyone who grew up around the culture knows the name is a giveaway—for a man, at least. Alma is the name of two major prophets, father and son, central to the narrative arc of The Book of Mormon. Only a devout family in the tradition would saddle it on a boy. And now he’ll be carrying it to Venice, representing the United States at the 2026 Biennale.

After some hemming and hawing, the U.S. State Department confirmed on Monday that Alma Allen would lead the U.S. pavilion. The announcement followed a messy selection process, so as soon as the news broke, outlets scrambled to figure out who this largely unfamiliar artist actually is. Aside from a major exhibition in Mexico City—where he now lives and works—Allen has never had a major museum show in the United States. He’s also known as something of a recluse. So journalists have been stitching together a biography from scattered interviews, studio visits, and the handful of profiles that exist. The result is a kind of self-perpetuating origin myth.

Allen was born in 1970 and grew up in Heber, Utah, in a large, devout Mormon family—the kind with no television in the house and only religious books on the shelves. He spent his childhood outdoors, wandering the Wasatch and the Utah desert, carving stones and driftwood before he had any sense that such a thing could be called “art.” As a teenager he discovered skateboarding and hardcore, left home at 16, drifted through a Bay Area squat, and eventually landed in New York at 19. There, in the early ’90s, a serious bicycle accident left him with medical bills and no safety net. To survive, he set up an ironing board on a SoHo sidewalk and sold the small carvings he’d been making. That chance visibility brought him into the orbit of collectors and dealers, and slowly set him on the path to a career. He didn’t stay put. After a year in East Kingston, New York—and a brush with the region’s punishing winters—he drove west and landed in Los Angeles, where he worked out of a Venice Beach storefront. From there he eventually built a home and studio on the outskirts of Joshua Tree National Park, back when the high desert still felt remote. When the wellness industry infiltrated the area and it all became too crowded, he headed further south, settling in Mexico City with his wife, curator Su Wu, in the former William Burroughs house in Roma Norte. His studio is now in Tepoztlán, an hour away, where he uses a robotic arm and an in-house foundry to produce large-scale sculpture.

A version of this rather poetic origin story, from Utah Mormon boy to self-taught street seller to internationally exhibited sculptor, will be repeated several times over the next few months.

But is he the same Alma Allen who opened a gallery on West Broadway in Salt Lake City in 1990 (when he would have been 20), became an officer in the Salt Lake Art Dealers Association, and continued exhibiting non-traditional artists like painter Layne Meacham and sculptor J.W. Stetich for two years until the early-’90s recession hit and he had to close the gallery and began washing dishes at the Rio Café (thank you Ann Poore for all the fine reporting back then)? Was it then that he returned to New York, got in the accident and was thrust on his path to the Venice Biennial? And did he return too Utah in 1997 for a show called I Love the Snow Queen at The Back Alley Gallery, behind Cordell Taylor’s space? Years later, did he bring his daughter back to Utah when his parents lived near Lake Powell for a family vacation? Did he attend his father’s funeral, in Leeds, in 2020?

These details won’t make it into the national narrative, where his ties to Utah and Mormonism will be vague background color at most. But they may help us to claim him as our own. Small places have that provincial charm of seeing the world through the local. If tens of thousands of people die in an earthquake in some remote local, we might not hear about it. But if a Utahn is among the body count, it will be front page news. Mormon culture has its own version of this. Growing up in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, Allen might have traded stories, as many of us of the same generation did, with his ward mates about shock-rocker Alice Cooper being Mormon and wearing temple garments on stage (there is no evidence for the latter, though the former is partly true: Cooper has some distant Mormon heritage through his grandfather, who was an Apostle in the Bickertonite branch of Mormonism) Or he might have become an instant 49ers fan when Steve Young joined them in 1987. So, it may be a stretch to call Allen Utah sculptor (and even less so a Mormon one: he says he left the faith early in his life), but he was born and raised here, and may have started his self-taught career in Salt Lake City.

His sculptures are easier to pin down than his biography. They’re often smooth, rounded, tactile forms—shapes that look eroded by water or weather, even when they’re carved from marble or cast in bronze. Some resemble oversized pebbles (is that seer stone I see?), seed pods, knots of wood, or twisted limbs—objects you could imagine finding in nature, only inflated to uncanny proportions. In wood he favors dense burls whose swirling grain becomes part of the form; in stone he produces ovoid masses, loops, and coils polished to a soft shine. Even his bronzes retain that organic softness: some stand upright like vertebrae, others curl or droop, and some sprout tendril-like extensions. Occasionally he interrupts the natural flow with perfectly drilled circular holes or cylindrical plugs, little mechanical intrusions that keep the work from feeling too serene. The scale varies wildly—from pocket-size to multi-ton—but the surfaces are always meticulous, reflective, almost seductive.

What are they? What do they mean? In such work, writers will inevitably reach for associations, which is when mythology comes in handy. As they did with Pollock so many years ago, they may connect his work to the West—its deserts, its geological time, its petroglyphs—or to the spirituality of Mormonism. He has contributed somewhat to the mythology. In one interview he said, “I grew up in an extremely religious context and did not understand there was a world outside of that system of belief at the time. The only books in the house were religious texts. I had never gone into cities or had television. But as a child, I would go into caves and see petroglyphs.” It paints a picture of a family removed, some rural setting, surrounded by caves and petroglyphs. You can almost see the long-bearded patriarch. The reality, of course, is more banal. His father ran, ironically, a TV-repair business in Provo and a camera and music shop in Heber, which in the 1980s was rural, yes, but not wild; and Salt Lake and Provo were half an hour away. Mythologies compress distance and time. They rarely ring true for those who know the landscape.

The selection for the U.S. pavilion comes wrapped in its own set of myths—and controversies. None of them concern Allen personally, but the institutional context has been widely criticized. The process was described as “deeply dispiriting”: a delayed selection, a scrapped earlier proposal, and newly rewritten federal guidelines that dropped references to diversity and equity in favor of promoting “American values.” Allen’s relative lack of visibility—no major U.S. museum solo, few interviews—has prompted debate about what exactly the United States hopes to project in Venice. Some see his appointment as aligning with the current administration’s preference for a depoliticized, excellence-forward image rather than a confrontational or socially engaged one. (There was also that body of bronze work patinated to look like gold). The result is that the controversy has little to do with Allen himself and everything to do with the machinery around him: what the U.S. chooses to show the world, and why.

Whether any of this will matter once the work is installed in Venice is another question. Mythologies have a way of overrunning the facts—Utah knows this better than most. And it’s entirely possible that Allen’s quiet, otherworldly objects will outshine whatever narrative is attached to them. But for now, all the storylines are still in play.

https://artreview.com/march-2015-review-alma-allen/

https://galeriemagazine.com/creative-mind-alma-allen/

https://hyperallergic.com/1059343/artist-alma-allen-to-represent-us-at-2026-venice-biennale/

https://www.upstatediary.com/alma-allen

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/alma-allen-artist-interview-1764867

https://review.kasmingallery.com/weekend-long-reads/alma-allen/

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/who-is-alma-allen-the-artist-who-will-represent-the-us-at-the-venice-biennale

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/11/24/alma-allen-officially-representing-us-venice-biennale-2026

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/us-pavilion-venice-biennale-robert-lazzarini-2709240

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/who-is-alma-allen-venice-biennale-2709876

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.