US Pavilion at Venice Biennale Is $1 Million Short

By Marcus Bennett

The US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is roughly $1 million short of covering its costs, and Alma Allen's enormous stone and metal sculptures may be left stranded in Italy. That is the picture emerging from a report in The New York Times, which obtained a fundraising letter from Jenni Parido, the pavilion's commissioner.

"While we have accomplished a tremendous amount in a relatively short period," Parido wrote, "the final phase of this undertaking has presented financial challenges that I am working tirelessly to resolve."

The American Arts Conservancy, the nonprofit behind the pavilion, has raised $1.4 million against a projected budget of just under $2.5 million. The gap leaves no money to dismantle the exhibition, store the massive sculptures or ship them back to the United States. The Biennale closes next month.

Why can't the sculptures simply stay in Venice?

There is nowhere obvious to put them. The US Pavilion has no storage facilities. The Guggenheim Foundation, which owns the building, does not have room for the works.

The funding trouble adds another chapter to an unusually messy American outing at the Biennale. Parido, whose previous business experience included running an upscale pet boutique in Florida, was a surprise choice to oversee the pavilion. The Trump administration scrapped the traditional selection process, which relied on proposals from established arts institutions and an independent review panel. Parido got the job after a recommendation from her friend Erin Scavino, who heads the State Department's Art in Embassies program.

Organizers eventually settled on Allen, an American sculptor based in Mexico, after several artists reportedly turned the opportunity down. Things did not go smoothly from there.

What went wrong behind the scenes?

Allen told the Times that neither Parido nor the exhibition's curator, Jeffrey Uslip, visited his studio to see the sculptures before the show. By the end of the Biennale's preview days, Allen and Uslip were no longer speaking.

Allen said he knew nothing about the nonprofit's fundraising. His own expenses amounted to travel and a cheap Airbnb, for which he was reimbursed.

Organizers had initially pitched the exhibition's modest price tag as a selling point, calling it one of the cheapest US pavilions ever mounted. The 2024 American presentation cost about $5 million. The 2022 edition came in at nearly $7 million.

The State Department provided a $375,000 grant toward this year's pavilion, with private donors expected to cover the rest. Parido's fundraising efforts included a party during Art Basel Miami Beach and a dinner at Mar-a-Lago. The department told the Times it was not involved in raising the money.

What happens if the gap is not closed?

For now, nobody is saying. The American Arts Conservancy did not answer the Times' questions about what it would do if it could not afford to bring the sculptures home. Parido continues to appeal to potential donors as the closing date approaches.

Katy Siegel, who helped organize the 2017 American pavilion, gave the Times a pithy assessment of the situation.

"This is crazy," she said.

Unless a donor steps forward within weeks, the question of how a Biennale nation repatriates its own art may become the final act of an American presentation that began with a broken selection process and ends, potentially, with works abandoned far from home.