An American Artist in Venice
Venice is a city of water. Its roads, commerce, security, and success are due to the intertwining canals that appear labyrinthine to the stranger yet form a safety net for natives. For over a thousand years, the Serenissima Republic of Venice dominated the seas, amassing wealth, spearheading technology, and producing breathtakingly beautiful art, from glass to canvas. Now in 2026, for the 61st edition of the Biennale Exhibition of Art and Culture, the United States of America, a young republic celebrating its 250th anniversary, has disembarked on these shores to dialogue with its ancient ancestor.
Titled Call me the Breeze, Alma Allen’s solo installation of biomorphic sculptures seems anything but airy and easy-going. They are large, and at times physically invasive. Some works dazzle with gold gilding, others mesmerize with dark depths. Few have titles, disorienting to the visitor at first. It may be, however, a key to the hermeneutic of the exhibition: becoming, transforming, and enduring. Venice has reinvented itself many a time – warriors, merchants, diplomats, artists and pilgrims have all enjoyed a day in the city’s fickle sun; could that malleability be the secret to the longevity of a republic?
Much has been made of the person of the artist. Alma Allen found himself homeless at 16, eschewed formal art training, and has migrated from Utah to California to Tepoztlán in Mexico. His biography seems to capture the spirit of the American frontier, which might explain his selection as the lone presenter at the American pavilion (although Allen showed works in the 2014 edition). Confronted with his creations, however, the personality of the artist recedes, and the mastery of the material emerges. Stone and bronze, shaped by the hand and mind of a human being, suggest the indomitable American spirit that exalted nature, but also tamed it.
Veteran curator Jeffrey Uslip, who helmed Malta’s installation in the 59th Biennale, highlighted the singularity of the pieces by creating a sculptural landscape. Without altering or disguising the Jeffersonian-style pavilion, he enveloped each of Allen’s pieces with space and air, evoking the vast expanses of the West, where the clouds, rocks, and flora take on imposing, yet anthropomorphic, forms. The viewer becomes the breeze, passing through the monoliths and monuments, an ephemeral passage through eternal elements.
Uslip’s installation reflects Venice’s mystique. The lagoons keep the maritime republic regularly sheathed in fog, so natives navigate its winding calle through ripples of movement and flickers of light. The dearth of captions in the installation invites visitors to explore and discover, as Europeans once journeyed through the New World. Uslip offers few signposts, merely a marble totem or flash of gilding, to beckon viewers to reflect on where they are going.
The experience of the show ranges from unsettling to challenging to uplifting to soothing. From the first approach, there are reminders that exploration is not for the faint of heart. Affixed to the brick exterior one may or may not notice a bronze disc, the first exhibit. To the contemporary eye, it recalls a Police Observation Device, now ubiquitous in urban settings, surveilling the exterior. Two bronze “sentinels” with protuberances that may be phallic, bellicose, or merely random, bar the path into the forecourt. There, a lone creature formed of four legs draped with what appear to be ribbons of bronze – described by Italians as a “fettuccine sheep” -- stands apart. Perhaps Allen, once a shearer, views the unshorn creature that has left the fold to fend for itself as a metaphor for his own career outside the gatekeepers of academia, but it might be there to warn that it takes audacity to leave the safety of the herd.
For me, a historian of 17th-century art, this exhibit was a foray into unexplored territory. After a lifetime of figurative art, it felt like a betrayal of Bernini et al to study abstract “biomorphic” objects. What won me over, however, besides the passion and the thoughtfulness of the curator, were the materials themselves. Touching the fins and ripples carved into a perfectly polished piece of Guatemalan green quartzite evokes the pleasure of art. The Venetians once plied oil onto canvas to veil languid bodies with misty glazes, inviting viewers to imagine sensation and scent. Allen’s sinuous stones awaken the senses – more than what one sees in the piece is what one feels. Where 17th-century sculptors captivated their audiences by transforming stone into leaves, flesh, hair, or wounds to recount history or myth, Allen’s marble spirals, bulbs, dimples and horns have no such literary concetto, allowing the visitor to create his or her own story. Uslip uses the term “contemporary imaginary” and perhaps, in a post-truth age, with little cultural commonality, Allen’s invitations to reflections might stimulate collective conversations.
The five rooms of the exhibition take the visitor on a modern odyssey. In an “autobiographical” space, bronze shapes recall a night sky. Across an expanse of white floor, a figure might be fishing, the halcyon days of youth, evoked by the words of JJ Cale’s 1972 song, which gives its name to the exhibit:
They call me the breeze,
I keep blowing down the road
I ain't got me nobody,
I ain't carrying me no load
Whether for people or polis, youthful years give way to challenges. A golden figure – understood to be the artist’s daughter – catches the eye. The suppleness of the form is charged with tense energy as it appears to survey a dangerous landscape. Yet tribulations encourage transformations and the successive space alludes to change. A large mass with a jutting blade – perhaps Excalibur, to the more literary minded – may allude to the wealth of mining. The room shimmers with gilt pieces, the most striking being a series of serpentine designs created for this exhibition. Shedding skin to a shining rebirth: once the Venetians, merchant princes, sported brocade and built their Ca’ D’Or. Today the U.S., the wealthiest country in the world, cloaks itself in the glimmering trappings of prosperity.
Nonetheless, the heart of the republic is its faith, drawing its citizens together around the recognition of the higher power. A single work graces the rotunda, the core of the pavilion: a fluted, glided, spiral of bronze surging upwards towards the light. Uslip gently hints that the work might evoke a Marian apparition, Our Lady of Guadalupe, which diffused the Christian faith in the Americas.
But how to talk about faith, morals, duty, and responsibility in a contentious post Christian age? Biomorphism, which suggests rather than scolds, “disarms people” according to Uslip, whose 2022 Maltese installation was called Diplomazija Astuta, “astute diplomacy.” Venice has always been politically minded as a city, and its Biennale has always been marked by political considerations. The United States opened its pavilion in 1930, the same year Mussolini’s fascist government took control of the exhibition. Call me the Breeze proposes a subtle diplomacy by inviting viewers to dialogue and reflection through art. It makes quite a contrast to Jeffrey Gibson’s 2024 United States exhibit “the space in which to place me,” which covered the pavilion in a stridently colored mixture of Native American textiles and patterns evoking the LGBTQ+ banner. Asked if there had been a “divorce” between art and the American people, Uslip answered no, but that he thinks “a work of art is a work of philosophy” and since much contemporary art is “agenda driven,” it has become a source of contention instead of unity.
That said, Allen and Uslip have no fear of provocation. When the visitor walks in behind a large figure seated before a massive hollow oval of Colorado yule marble, the stone used for most major U.S. monuments: Is it a mirror and an image of self-absorption or is it a window to a brave new world ahead? Nearby, a bronze relief resembles a door – is it opening or barely closed – what lies behind that curtain?
The exhibit closes with a more overt reflection on the anniversary celebrations of the republic. A piece of burl wood, formed by injury to a tree, sits by the exit. Created by the fusion of American and British walnut, it looks like a large seed waiting to blossom, a reminder that the United States grew out of a traumatic separation. A plaque of rippled bronze hangs nearby, the upper part dark, the rest covered with a patina that changes color with the light. It suggests a flag, but it also recalls the waters of Venice--- opaque, mysterious, mutating---perhaps this is the lesson from the old republic to the new: transformation is a necessary part of growth, a means to seek light against encroaching danger and darkness.
Ever since President Trump’s State Department proposed guidelines to showcase "American exceptionalism," the exhibit and the artist have been roundly condemned by many media outlets hostile to the administration. My question was: what does “American exceptionalism” look like today? Is it a tech wizard, a warrior, a movie star? Or is it the ability to persevere in unfamiliar and ever-changing landscapes with the faith that with hard work and integrity one can make a lasting contribution towards the common good?
Elizabeth Lev is a Rome-based art historian who holds degrees in art history from the University of Chicago and the University of Bologna. She teaches art history at University of Mary’s Rome campus and the Pontifical University of Thomas Aquinas as well as being a well-known tour guide and a consultant to the Vatican Museums. Lev’s books include The Tigress of Forlì and How Catholic Art Saved the Faith, and she has written for many news outlets, including The Washington Post and First Things. She worked as a Vatican analyst for MSNBC for three conclaves, and has appeared on the Today Show, Nightline, and 60 Minutes and her TED Talk on the Sistine Chapel has garnered over 1.9 million views. She is the owner and founder of LizLevTours and Masters’ Gallery Rome, and is a certified sommelier.
