{"id":99654,"date":"2025-11-25T11:11:31","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T18:11:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=99654"},"modified":"2025-11-26T09:00:18","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T16:00:18","slug":"utah-sculptor-who-now-works-in-mexico-to-represent-the-u-s-at-the-venice-biennial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/utah-sculptor-who-now-works-in-mexico-to-represent-the-u-s-at-the-venice-biennial\/","title":{"rendered":"Utah Sculptor Who Now Works in Mexico to Represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Portrait of Alma Allen. Photo by Ana Hop. Courtesy of the American Arts Conservancy.<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u2014for 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<\/em>. Only a devout family in the tradition would saddle it on a boy. And now he\u2019ll be carrying it to Venice, representing the United States at the 2026 Biennale.<\/h4>\n

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\u2014where he now lives and works\u2014Allen has never had a major museum show in the United States. He\u2019s 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.<\/h4>\n

Allen was born in 1970 and grew up in Heber, Utah, in a large, devout Mormon family\u2014the 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 \u201cart.\u201d 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 \u201990s, 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\u2019d 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\u2019t stay put. After a year in East Kingston, New York\u2014and a brush with the region\u2019s punishing winters\u2014he 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 Tepoztl\u00e1n, an hour away, where he uses a robotic arm and an in-house foundry to produce large-scale sculpture.<\/h4>\n

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.<\/h4>\n

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-\u201990s recession hit and he had to close the gallery and began washing dishes at the Rio Caf\u00e9 (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<\/em> 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\u2019s funeral, in Leeds, in 2020?<\/h4>\n

These details won\u2019t 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 \u201870s and early \u201880s, 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.<\/h4>\n

His sculptures are easier to pin down than his biography. They\u2019re often smooth, rounded, tactile forms\u2014shapes that look eroded by water or weather, even when they\u2019re 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\u2014objects 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\u2014from pocket-size to multi-ton\u2014but the surfaces are always meticulous, reflective, almost seductive.<\/h4>\n

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\u2014its deserts, its geological time, its petroglyphs\u2014or to the spirituality of Mormonism. He has contributed somewhat to the mythology. In one interview he said, \u201cI 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.\u201d 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.<\/h4>\n

The selection for the U.S. pavilion comes wrapped in its own set of myths\u2014and controversies. None of them concern Allen personally, but the institutional context has been widely criticized. The process was described as \u201cdeeply dispiriting\u201d: a delayed selection, a scrapped earlier proposal, and newly rewritten federal guidelines that dropped references to diversity and equity in favor of promoting \u201cAmerican values.\u201d Allen\u2019s relative lack of visibility\u2014no major U.S. museum solo, few interviews\u2014has prompted debate about what exactly the United States hopes to project in Venice. Some see his appointment as aligning with the current administration\u2019s 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.<\/h4>\n

Whether any of this will matter once the work is installed in Venice is another question. Mythologies have a way of overrunning the facts\u2014Utah knows this better than most. And it\u2019s entirely possible that Allen\u2019s quiet, otherworldly objects will outshine whatever narrative is attached to them. But for now, all the storylines are still in play.<\/h4>\n


https:\/\/artreview.com\/march-2015-review-alma-allen\/<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/galeriemagazine.com\/creative-mind-alma-allen\/<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/hyperallergic.com\/1059343\/artist-alma-allen-to-represent-us-at-2026-venice-biennale\/<\/a>
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https:\/\/www.upstatediary.com\/alma-allen<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/news.artnet.com\/art-world\/alma-allen-artist-interview-1764867<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/review.kasmingallery.com\/weekend-long-reads\/alma-allen\/<\/a>
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https:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/style\/story\/who-is-alma-allen-the-artist-who-will-represent-the-us-at-the-venice-biennale<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.theartnewspaper.com\/2025\/11\/24\/alma-allen-officially-representing-us-venice-biennale-2026<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/news.artnet.com\/art-world\/us-pavilion-venice-biennale-robert-lazzarini-2709240<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/news.artnet.com\/art-world\/who-is-alma-allen-venice-biennale-2709876<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2014for a man, at least. Alma is the name of two major prophets, father […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":99658,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[4787],"class_list":["post-99654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-visual_arts","tag-alma-allen"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/alma-allen.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-06 15:52:41","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99654"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99700,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99654\/revisions\/99700"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}