As questions continue to swirl around Alma Allen’s US Pavilion for this year’s Venice Biennale, sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud revealed that she was also offered the opportunity to represent the country—and that she had declined it.
News of Chase-Riboud’s decision to say no was first reported by the New York Times yesterday, in an extensive feature by Zachary Small on the rocky run-up to Allen’s choice, which came after the Trump administration removed language about diversity from the application materials. But the article did not quote Chase-Riboud on the matter until a feature on the pavilion that ran in the Financial Times today.
“Participating in the 61st Venice Biennale would have been splendid,” Chase-Riboud told journalist Julia Halperin. “Art is the only thing that proves that anything has ever happened in the world. For me, as a world citizen, this was not the moment.”
Both papers, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, also reported that another 86-year-old artist, the photographer William Eggleston, had been offered the pavilion and that he, too, declined. Eggleston has not publicly commented.
Chase-Riboud is widely known for large-scale sculptures combining hard bronze elements with soft materials such as silk. Often, her abstract sculptures are named after Black figures throughout history, from Sally Hemings to Malcolm X.
She had been given the offer to do the pavilion in Venice by its commissioner, the American Arts Conservancy. That organization is a nonprofit that was founded in 2025 by Jenni Parido, who does not have a large presence within the art world. As Ben Davis first reported last year in Artnet News, prior to leading the American Arts Conservancy, Parido operated a pet food supply store in Tampa, Florida.
At least one other artist has said he was offered the pavilion, too. Sculptor Robert Lazzarini previously stated that his proposal was selected, but that the invitation was later taken away from him amid what he described as “bureaucracies failing to mesh.”
Allen told the Financial Times that he and curator Jeffrey Uslip had faced no pushback during the creation of their pavilion, which will open in May along with the rest of the Biennale. “No one has told me what to make in any circumstance,” he said.
Some, including ARTnews, have questioned whether Allen’s work is an appropriate fit to represent the US as it stands right now. Jeff Poe, cofounder of Blum & Poe, a now defunct gallery that represented Allen, told the Financial Times that the artist’s pavilion is likely to have “vanilla, modernist, lovely work that doesn’t speak to anything that’s happening.”
Allen has brushed off that allegation, telling the New York Times, “I don’t think my work is political in respect to party politics.”
