United States Pavilion to Open at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia With Landmark Solo Presentation by Alma Allen: Call Me the Breeze

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The U.S. Pavilion will host an opening event on Wednesday, May 6 at 11 a.m., during the Biennale’s official opening week in Venice, inaugurating the 2026 exhibition curated by Jeffrey Uslip

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Call Me the Breeze
Commissioner: Jenni Parido; Curator: Jeffrey Uslip; Exhibitor: Alma Allen
Venue: Giardini

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VENICE, Italy, May 04, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The United States Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia presents “Call Me the Breeze,” an expansive solo presentation by acclaimed American artist Alma Allen, curated by Jeffrey Uslip, and commissioned by the American Arts Conservancy in cooperation with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), with support from the Guggenheim Foundation. Widely regarded as one of the most influential recurring exhibitions in the world, La Biennale di Venezia convenes leading artists, curators, scholars, institutions, collectors, and international audiences from across the globe. The United States Pavilion remains among its most prominent and closely watched national presentations.

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In Venice this year, Allen will transform the historic pavilion through a sweeping corpus of sculpture made of cast bronze, shaped American walnut burl, and a variety of carved stone including of Mexican onyx, Guatemalan green quartzite, Mexican black marble, and Persian travertine, as well as Colorado Yule marble, a luminous white stone that has been used to construct several of our nation’s historic monuments, including the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

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Celebrated for a practice that merges natural form with architectural precision, Allen’s work feels at once ancient, contemporary, elemental, and deeply human.

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The exhibition will position the Pavilion as a contemplative environment, championing art that favors deep time and eschews finite positions. Conceived specifically for Venice, the presentation invites audiences into a dialogue between permanence and transformation, intimacy and monumentality, trauma and rehabilitation, landscape and memory. Taken as a whole, “Call Me the Breeze” is a proposal to be our future selves in the present and explores the concept of elevation, both as a physical manifestation of form and as a symbol of self-realization.

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Reflecting on the honor of being selected to represent the United States at the Biennale, Allen said the works invite viewers to participate in the act of communication and making meaning: “I see communication as one individual at a time engaging with the work while simultaneously experiencing their own moment of creation,” he reflected. “I feel like this combination happens each time a person offers their attention – and is willing to feel and decide for themselves what the work means.”

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“Alma Allen’s biomorphic sculptures evoke the visceral realities of contemporary life and reveal the fragility and resilience of the human condition,” added Jeffrey Uslip, Curator of the 2026 U.S. Pavilion. “The expansive environments and landscapes in which Allen has lived and worked have shaped his points of view, developed his sculptural vocabulary, and informed how he moves through the world. This exhibition will offer an immersive encounter with an artist whose practice speaks to timeless questions of beauty, space, memory, and our relationship to the natural world.”