{"id":1909422,"date":"2026-04-29T21:17:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T18:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1909422"},"modified":"2026-04-29T21:17:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T18:17:07","slug":"how-will-the-venice-biennale-impact-alma-allens-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1909422","title":{"rendered":"How Will the Venice Biennale Impact Alma Allen’s Market?"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/2-Not-Yet-Titled-2019.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

\n
\n

\n\tControversy has swirled around the artist\u00a0Alma Allen\u00a0<\/strong>since he was announced as America\u2019s representative at this year\u2019s Venice Biennale, which opens to art professionals and press next week. The conversation\u00a0has tended to highlight the compromised selection\u00a0process under President Trump, with much of the scrutiny centered around the fact that a museum didn\u2019t commission\u00a0the pavilion, as is common. Instead, the commissioner this time is a newly created body called the\u00a0American Arts Conservancy<\/strong>\u00a0headed by\u00a0Jenni Parido,<\/strong>\u00a0who up until 2024 ran a boutique pet food lifestyle shop in Tampa, Florida, and entered Trump\u2019s orbit though pet charity events held at Mar-a-Lago. After the announcement, Allen\u2019s galleries,\u00a0Olney Gleason<\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0Mendes Wood DM<\/strong>\u00a0dropped him, but a new, just as high-profile\u00a0one, Perrotin, picked him up.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe question\u00a0now is, what will the effect of the Biennale\u2014and all its attendant drama\u2014be\u00a0on\u00a0Allen\u2019s market?<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI love Alma,\u201d\u00a0Beth Rudin DeWoody,<\/strong>\u00a0a longtime supporter, said. \u201cI collect his work and I\u2019m not at all happy with his controversy. I think art should just transcend all of that\u2026 [Venice] is a great opportunity for him. It\u2019s a shame his galleries dropped him.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPerhaps lost in all of it is the fact that Allen has some longtime collectors, de Woody included. The first\u00a0ones to buy his work were the designers, jewelers, artists, and all-around creative types who supported his efforts in the early \u201990s, when he was selling small sculptures off an ironing board he\u2019d 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\u2019s collectors included Hard Rock Caf\u00e9 cofounder\u00a0Peter Morton,<\/strong>\u00a0artist\u00a0Jack Pierson,<\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0Mark Fletcher,<\/strong>\u00a0art adviser to some of the top collectors in the world. De Woody, meanwhile, has been\u00a0on\u00a0the\u00a0ARTnews\u00a0<\/em>Top 200 Collectors list for decades and is known for buying work by emerging artists who later hit it big.<\/p>\n

\n\tThose collectors were encountering the work not in galleries but in Allen\u2019s own spaces,\u00a0often buying directly from him.<\/strong>\u00a0After he joined\u00a0Blum & Poe<\/strong>\u00a0in 2015, that collector base deepened and expanded. According to two sources familiar with Allen\u2019s 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 Beyonc\u00e9, Katy Perry, Issey Miyake, Todd Oldham, and Julio Espada.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo far\u00a0only 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\u2019t exactly cause a spike, but more pieces came up in a season\u00a0than 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\u00a0online this March. The estimate was between $7,000 and $10,000.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\"Portrait<\/div>\n<\/div>
Alma Allen.<\/span>\u00a9Louis Garvan\/Courtesy Perrotin<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tAllen\u2019s 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\u2019s career a boost, \u201cbring[ing] further opportunities from both institutional and private collections.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd it would seem there is room to grow. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of people who seem to be unfamiliar with Alma\u2019s work,\u201d\u00a0one source who has known him and his collector base for years told me. \u201cThose people simply aren\u2019t knowledgeable about contemporary art.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\"A<\/div>\n<\/div>
Alma Allen, Not Yet Titled<\/em>, 2016.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tAs for Allen, a few weeks ago, at Harry\u2019s Bar in Venice, he told me that he purposefully does not give explanatory titles to his works. (Every work is titled\u00a0Not Yet Titled<\/em>.) He\u2019d 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\u2019s generally avoided explaining his art or doing interviews, has worked against him.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI do see that I have maybe made a mistake in never engaging in that part of it,\u201d Allen said, \u201cbecause it\u2019s left open that the work is a certain kind of thing that\u2019s easy to do. It lets other people define what my work is.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/market\/alma-allen-venice-biennale-us-pavilion-market-1234783155\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/2-Not-Yet-Titled-2019.jpg?w=1024″] Controversy has swirled around the artist\u00a0Alma Allen\u00a0since he was announced as America\u2019s representative at this year\u2019s Venice Biennale, which opens to art professionals and press next week. The conversation\u00a0has tended to highlight the compromised selection\u00a0process under President Trump, with much of the scrutiny centered around the fact that a museum didn\u2019t commission\u00a0the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1909422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1909422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1909422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1909422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1909422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1909422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1909422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}