Even Venice Isn’t Safe From America’s Culture War

For over a century, the Venice Biennale has existed to allow nations to present reflections of their national narrative through contemporary art. Saturday marks the public opening of the 61st Biennale. Given the mass of negative, left-wing press surrounding the American pavilion, one might think the U.S. was erecting a giant, golden statue of President Donald Trump for the exhibition.

The fact of the matter is that this controversy says far more about the political ideology of the art world’s elites than it does about the artist and organizers of this year’s pavilion. In other words, the Left’s instinct to politicize every institution it touches has become increasingly evident.

After the State Department revised its guidelines for the artists and exhibits, requiring that American values and interests be reflected rather than DEI, many applicants were no longer suited to represent the U.S.

That was when the State Department appointed a new commissioner: Jenni Parido. Immediately, her competency was questioned, despite her founding the American Arts Conservancy a year prior, an organization dedicated to preserving and promoting American art through diplomacy, education, and archival work.

A member of AAC’s advisory board, Jeffrey Uslip, was chosen as the pavilion’s curator. He too received an onslaught of criticism for being accused of having curated a “racist” exhibit a decade ago.

He then selected sculptor Alma Allen to represent the U.S. at the Biennale, who, of course, also did not escape the negative media. In recent months, critics’ biggest complaint has been to claim that the selection of Allen is a political statement tied to the Trump administration, the State Department, or broader ideological disputes within American cultural institutions.

Now living in Mexico though, Mr. Allen has never once met anyone in the Trump orbit. In fact, Allen is seen as a man who believes that his art transcends party politics.

“I feel like if I tell everyone—like a propagandist—what to think, that’s boring,” Allen said.

But Mr. Allen’s work should speak for itself.

His work seems to be intentionally vague to allow visitors to make what they want of the American landscape and freedom that sculpts us all.

He portrays this figuratively, but also literally. All of Allen’s sculptures are made of materials derived from the natural resources of the Americas. Using bronze, American walnut burl, and white Colorado Yule marble (the very stone used to construct the Lincoln Memorial) among others, to evoke American life and its history.

Naturally, the left-wing elites of the art world took issue with this, and in recent months, they have run every negative story they can muster.

And why? To take down Jenni Parido? To discredit Allen? To avenge the death of their beloved DEI?

A recent article in The New York Times noted bluntly that the art world “generally views association with the Trump administration as toxic.”

The issue was never with Allen or his art. It is with the Left’s view of America and the current administration. Leftist elites from the art world have made out Allen to be a criminal simply for accepting the opportunity to present his work to the world and contribute to the American narrative at one of the most prestigious cultural exhibitions on earth.

And perhaps that is precisely what makes the pavilion so meaningful this year.

The American pavilion is a fitting tribute to the U.S. as it approaches its 250th anniversary: rooted in landscape, inheritance, and permanence rather than partisan performance.

Meanwhile, the Left increasingly struggles to allow anything to exist outside the Marxist framework of political struggle. Every institution must become ideological. Every exhibition must declare allegiance. Every cultural expression must serve activism.

And their instinct to do so continues to erode the very cultural cohesion the Biennale was designed to celebrate in the first place.

The biennale is supposed to allow artists to represent their nations to the world through art. This year, the U.S., has done precisely that.

We did not send propaganda to Venice. We did not send activists. We sent bronze, wood, and stone. We sent an artist shaped by the raw terrain of the American West. And perhaps that is exactly what national representation at the Venice Biennale ought to be. The Left’s cultural fragmentation should no longer be welcomed.