Controversy has swirled around the artist Alma Allen since he was announced as America’s representative at this year’s Venice Biennale, which opens to art professionals and press next week. The conversation has tended to highlight the compromised selection process under President Trump, with much of the scrutiny centered around the fact that a museum didn’t commission the pavilion, as is common. Instead, the commissioner this time is a newly created body called the American Arts Conservancy headed by Jenni Parido, who up until 2024 ran a boutique pet food lifestyle shop in Tampa, Florida, and entered Trump’s orbit though pet charity events held at Mar-a-Lago. After the announcement, Allen’s galleries, Olney Gleason and Mendes Wood DM dropped him, but a new, just as high-profile one, Perrotin, picked him up.
The question now is, what will the effect of the Biennale—and all its attendant drama—be on Allen’s market?
“I love Alma,” Beth Rudin DeWoody, a longtime supporter, said. “I collect his work and I’m not at all happy with his controversy. I think art should just transcend all of that… [Venice] is a great opportunity for him. It’s a shame his galleries dropped him.”
Perhaps lost in all of it is the fact that Allen has some longtime collectors, de Woody included. The first ones to buy his work were the designers, jewelers, artists, and all-around creative types who supported his efforts in the early ’90s, when he was selling small sculptures off an ironing board he’d dragged to a street corner in downtown New York. (He had just been hit by a bus, was broke, and needed $20 for food.) Over time, his fan base grew. By 2014, Allen’s collectors included Hard Rock Café cofounder Peter Morton, artist Jack Pierson, and Mark Fletcher, art adviser to some of the top collectors in the world. De Woody, meanwhile, has been on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list for decades and is known for buying work by emerging artists who later hit it big.
Those collectors were encountering the work not in galleries but in Allen’s own spaces, often buying directly from him. After he joined Blum & Poe in 2015, that collector base deepened and expanded. According to two sources familiar with Allen’s career, Lynda Benglis, Amalia Dayan, Ann Reynolds, Edward Nigel, Yusaku Maezawa, Wolfgang Joop, Alice Tisch, Ken Griffin, and Ryan Murphy have acquired his work. Allen himself has said that his collectors include Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Issey Miyake, Todd Oldham, and Julio Espada.
So far only small works by Allen have turned up at auction, selling for mostly within-estimate prices ranging from $4,000 to $12,000. (Allen is also a furniture designer, and has sold sculptures that can be used as tables and stools for within the range of $35,000 to $65,000, though some commissions have gone up to $125,000.) The announcement in November that he would be the Biennale artist didn’t exactly cause a spike, but more pieces came up in a season than usual, including a swirling sculpture made of found black marble that Allen made in 2016, which sold for $12,900 at Phillips modern and contemporary sale online this March. The estimate was between $7,000 and $10,000.
Alma Allen.
©Louis Garvan/Courtesy Perrotin
Allen’s primary market prices currently range from $25,000 to $300,000, with pedestal-scale works ranging from $35,000 to $50,000, the human-size indoor works from $65,000 to $100,000 and the sizable outdoors sculptures starting around $150,000; his first solo with Perrotin will be in Paris in October, during Art Basel Paris and the last full month of the Biennale. A Perrotin rep told me the gallery expects the Biennale will give Allen’s career a boost, “bring[ing] further opportunities from both institutional and private collections.”
And it would seem there is room to grow. “There’s a lot of people who seem to be unfamiliar with Alma’s work,” one source who has known him and his collector base for years told me. “Those people simply aren’t knowledgeable about contemporary art.”
Alma Allen, Not Yet Titled, 2016.
As for Allen, a few weeks ago, at Harry’s Bar in Venice, he told me that he purposefully does not give explanatory titles to his works. (Every work is titled Not Yet Titled.) He’d rather viewers form their own opinions without being influenced by a prescribed meaning. Still, he wondered whether the ambiguity around the work, the lack of context-heavy titles, and the fact that he’s generally avoided explaining his art or doing interviews, has worked against him.
“I do see that I have maybe made a mistake in never engaging in that part of it,” Allen said, “because it’s left open that the work is a certain kind of thing that’s easy to do. It lets other people define what my work is.”
