Every two years, the cultural exchange staffers at the State Department start the long journey that will end at the Venice Biennale’s United States Pavilion, the Palladian-style grand exhibition space in the middle of an art-filled garden in the city of canals. The event is often called the “Olympics of the Art World,” and appropriately, the Giardini is filled with a pavilion for each country, spaces for exhibiting the work of a single artist chosen to represent their nation that year.
It’s the world’s most prestigious cosmopolitan cultural expo, and drew a record 800,000 visitors in 2022. Artists who snag the coveted perch inside the US pavilion can turn from critical darlings into mega-gallery-backed art stars. After the Biennale opened in 2024, US-submitted artist Jeffrey Gibson was picked up for representation by Hauser & Wirth. And like the Olympics, the Biennale is a competition: The best national pavilion is awarded the Golden Lion—past winners include Bruce Nauman, Jenny Holzer, and Daniel Buren.
Usually, the selection process in the US starts when the Department’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs posts a grant for around $375,000 to fund the pavilion, and invites applicants to submit proposals for artists through a portal on the website for its Office of Citizen Exchanges. (The rest of the considerable cost of mounting the exhibition is usually raised from donors.) In past years, the grant has usually gone live about 18 months prior to the Biennale’s opening. A few months after that, the National Endowment for the Arts will post a federal notice saying that it will convene a panel of museum experts and arts scholars called the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions to oversee the applications. A month after that, the artist and curators who submitted the winning proposal get word that they’ve been chosen, and a month after that, it’s announced to the public.
But a funny thing seemed to be happening with that timeline ahead of the 2026 edition of the Biennale, which opens to VIPs in April of next year. As a few sources have pointed out to me in recent days, as of earlier this week, with a scant 12 months to go until the exhibition, none of the above had yet happened. Even in a best-case scenario, that would mean selecting an artist, prepping an exhibition, and transporting it from the US to Italy on a timeline that might diplomatically be described as compressed. Was Donald Trump’s State Department slow rolling the American entry? Was it doing so purposefully? By accident? Certainly, the idea of the chainsawed and DOGE-ified federal government endorsing contemporary art, even tacitly, even with a sum as relatively paltry as $375,000, does feel increasingly far-fetched. Then again, this is a competition, a chance for the country to exert its international dominance, and we do know our 47th president sure loves him some blood sport.
“I honestly think it might already be past the point of no return,” said Kathleen Ash-Milby, who co-commissioned the US Pavilion in 2024 and serves as the curator of Native American art at the Portland Art Museum. Just a year ago, during the invitation VIP opening week of the Biennale, Ash-Milby was standing alongside her cocurators, Abigail Winograd and Louis Grachos, in front of the pavilion, where Gibson’s large-scale sculptures spilled out from the building and into its large courtyard.
“When they open the portal, it’s not like it’s open for two weeks. They open it for a couple of months, and then they need a couple of months to process it,” she explained. “And if you don’t get notified until September or October, I don’t know how you could manage it.”
The US has programmed its pavilion during every two-year cycle, apart from the years leading up to World War II, when they were boycotting fascism in Italy, and then during the war years of 1942 and 1944, when the entire exhibition was cancelled due to the blood being shed in Europe. When I started reporting this column late last week, sources who had discussed the matter with current State Department employees said there appeared to be no movement in getting the application portal up and running. As I spoke to former pavilion curators, as well as current and past State Department employees, many questioned whether the US government might be intending to leave the pavilion entirely empty this round, joining the ranks of recent Venice abstentions. Russia has not had pavilions in the Giardini for the last two years due to the war in Ukraine. The Israel pavilion stayed closed in 2024, after its chosen artist refused to open her show until there was a ceasefire in Gaza and an agreement to release Israeli hostages.
Fear started rippling through the museum world last February, when it became obvious that something was amiss in the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which still does not have an assistant secretary, who is usually the point person for coordinating the State’s Biennale pick. Confusion was pervasive. It’s typical for past commissioners to field inquiries from colleagues who are putting together proposals, and this year, the candidates all had the same question for Ash-Milby: How do we apply for this thing? The portal was nowhere to be found.
Usually, the grant for the pavilion is posted by the State Department about 18 months before the exhibition is set to open in La Serenissima. The grant for the 2011 biennale was posted in December 2009, the grant for the 2013 Biennale was posted in May 2011, and the grant for the 2015 Biennale was posted in August 2013. So that timeframe has varied over the years, but, in recent times, the latest that the State Department activated a portal was for the last Biennale. That one went live in February 2023, announcing the State Department would allot $375,000 for the 2024 edition.
“The Biennale is one of the oldest and most prestigious international exhibitions of visual art, showcasing leading contemporary art from around the world,” read the text of the 2023 grant. “The Biennale is a unique opportunity to reach non-traditional and underserved audiences (e.g., youth, urban communities, and people with disabilities), and the US Department of State has special interest in engaging these audiences through outreach activities associated with the exhibition.”
