New York Metropolis-born artist and provocateur Andres Serrano desires the US Pavilion on the 2026 Venice Biennale to showcase his apparently uncritical show of greater than a thousand Trump memorabilia objects, together with a flattering, warm-hued portrait of the president he took in 2004 as a part of his sequence America.
Serrano, who rose to notoriety within the late ’80s for “Piss Christ” (1987), {a photograph} of a crucifix that he plunged right into a receptacle of his personal urine on the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts’ dime, submitted his Trump-themed Venice proposal to the US Division of State forward of its deadline later this month. The artist calls his American flag-saturated imaginative and prescient The Recreation: All Issues Trump, a reference to an underperforming board sport launched by Milton Bradley Firm in 1989.
The Trump administration’s new pointers for Biennale proposals say that the designs might be evaluated primarily based on standards together with artists’ “capacity to showcase American exceptionalism.”
Beneath the brand new stipulations, potential artists wishing to characterize the US within the occasion are prohibited from “selling Variety, Fairness, and Inclusion” and utilizing award funds to help the United Nations Aid and Works Company, which gives humanitarian support to Palestinians. The Division of State’s software mandates that Biennale packages assume a “non-political character.”
When Hyperallergic requested Serrano if he believes his work complies with that standards, he replied by way of a publicist, “After all, I’m not political. I don’t choose, I observe.”
Serrano’s pavilion proposal repurposes the identify and objects of a 2019 Manhattan exhibition that introduced $200,000 value of Trump relics amassed by the artist, together with a diploma from the defunct Trump College, an 11-foot signal spelling “EGO” from the shuttered Trump Taj Mahal On line casino in Atlantic Metropolis, autographed portraits, and presidential marketing campaign indicators. The proposal additionally consists of Serrano’s controversial movie concerning the January 6 Capitol takeover, Rebellion (2022), which critics described as sensational, missing context, and even pro-Trump.
In response to Hyperallergic‘s query about whether or not his pavilion design was meant to be ironic, Serrano mentioned, “My work is all the time open to interpretation, even my concepts are open to interpretation. Artists are usually not a technique or one other, they characterize various things to completely different folks.”
In 2024, Trump was photographed grinning whereas holding Serrano’s exhibition e book and reportedly added it to his library at Mar-a-Lago. Serrano has described Trump’s obvious endorsement of the e book as “comical,” however has additionally acknowledged within the context of the president that he’ll “by no means communicate sick of people that’ve posed for [him].” The photographer additionally took a smiling portrait of kid intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019, months earlier than the financier was discovered lifeless in his jail cell awaiting trial for expenses of trafficking dozens of minors within the early 2000s. His pictures have additionally portrayed Snoop Canine, hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan, and morgue corpses.
Serrano might have quietly submitted his proposal to the Division of State, however mentioned he determined to publicly promote his mock-up pavilion with a selected aim.
“I made a decision to publicize it as a result of I’m hoping the President will see it. It is smart to me that for America’s 250th Celebration, there’s nobody higher to characterize America than the President,” Serrano advised Hyperallergic in an e-mail.
