As President Donald Trump systematically guts the United States’ art programs and funding to roll out an aesthetic program of his own making, questions around the country’s participation in the forthcoming 2026 Venice Biennale loom large.
In a new piece for Vanity Fair, culture correspondent Nate Freeman tried to find out if the US will participate next year or if it even possible, given that the process seems to be running behind schedule.
The Venice Biennale is a prestigious, yet Herculean task. The Giardini is filled with a pavilion for each participating country, with the work of a single artist chosen to represent their nation that year. In 2022, such spectacle drew a record crowd of 800,000 visitors to Venice.
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As such, every two years, the cultural exchange staffers at the U.S. State Department begin the process of working on the US pavilion, which during the last edition featured work by Jeffrey Gibson. The Department’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs typically kicks off the selection process by posting a grant around $375,000 to fund the pavilion and inviting interested parties submit applications for artists through a portal on the website for its Office of Citizen Exchanges. Revenue is subsequently raised from donors to cover any additional costs.
For previous Biennales, the grant process has typically started about 18 months ahead of the opening, with the National Endowment for the Arts posting a federal notice to convene the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions, a panel of museum experts and arts scholars, who oversee the applications a few months later. The following month, the artist and curators with the winning proposal are informed. It is announced to the public in the month after.
But, as 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, told Vanity Fair, the process may already be so late as to “be past the point of no return.”
“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 said. “And if you don’t get notified until September or October, I don’t know how you could manage it.”
With only one year until the exhibition is slated to be mounted, a number of other countries have already started and many have already announced the artists helming their respective pavilions. These shows take months of planning, and even processes such as shipping the work can take quite a bit of time to get to Venice.
In addition to concerns of a tight timeline, the National Endowment for the Arts, which forms the committee that parses the applications, has since been halted; the assistant secretary position for the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs who normally coordinates the Biennale selection is vacant.
Despite these factors, there is still funding available that was set aside by the Biden administration as part of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ January 2024 budget.
The application portal is open; however, there have been noticeable changes made to the fine print, writes VF‘s Freeman, including creating “works of art that reflect and promote American values” and “fostering peaceful relations between the United States and other nations.”
It is, perhaps, unsurprising that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts have been scrubbed, given Trump’s nationwide removal of the initiatives. Those wishing to participate must demonstrate “compliance in all respects with all applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws” and cannot “operate any programs promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that violate any applicable anti-discrimination laws.”
Additionally, the State Department will be “monitoring site visits” to “gather additional information on the recipient’s ability to properly implement the project.”
The only times the US has not mounted a show were the years leading up to World War II, when they were boycotting fascism in Italy, and in the years during the war in 1942 and 1944, when the entire exhibition was cancelled.
As the world becomes increasingly volatile, however, other countries have abstained. Due to the war in Ukraine, for example, Russia has not had pavilions for the last two years. In 2024, the Israel pavilion closed after its artist refused to participate until a ceasefire in Gaza and an agreement to release Israeli hostages was made.