Alma Allen
Alma Allen is an American sculptor. He lived and worked in Joshua Tree, California. He currently works in Tepotzlán, Mexico.
Alma Allen

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- Name
- Alma Allen
- Birthplace
- Salt Lake City, Utah
- Born
- Alma Allen was born on 17 June 1970.
- Nationality
- United States
- Occupation
- wood carver · sculptor
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Alma Allen is an American sculptor. He lived and worked in Joshua Tree, California. He currently works in Tepotzlán, Mexico.
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wikidata · Q4733518
In this article
Key facts
Key facts
• Name — Alma Allen • Birthplace — Salt Lake City, Utah
Work
Work
• Illustration — Not yet titled (2021). Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens Carved from foraged wood and stone or cast in bronze, Allen's sculptures range in scale from thimble-sized fetishes to several ton pseudo-figures. Though made of the densest materials, the highly polished works appear to be in states of silent, inchoate movement. The New York Times described the shapes as "sensuous biomorphic forms", and 2014 Whitney Biennial co-curator Michelle Grabner selected three of Allen's large-scale sculptures for inclusion in the 2014 Biennial.
Career and critical reception
Career and critical reception
Prior to the 2014 Biennial, the self-taught artist was known to a following of collectors, but less so to the wider art establishment. He rarely exhibited, preferring to sell independently from his Mojave Desert studio, which the artist designed and built himself. The remote location of his studio, one hundred miles from Los Angeles on the edge of the Joshua Tree National Park, led to a reputation as a recluse. Biennial literature, however, sourced originality in a practice which developed "independently of any recognized art movement" and cited its "impeccable sense of material and form" as the reason for Allen's unlikely discovery by the art world. Though press accounts had previously taken notice of Allen's painstaking forms, modernist furniture in the tradition of Isamu Noguchi and Donald Judd, images of Allen's Biennial contributions circulated widely in mainstream art-specialized media following the exhibition. Time magazine named his white marble Untitled, 2013, one of the "Five Best Works at the Whitney Biennial", and writing for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, the director Matt Tyrnauer profiled the artist's "road less traveled to art world stardom." Writing in Artforum, critic Andrew Berardini referred to the "gravitational force" of the works in a solo exhibition of Allen's work at Blum & Poe gallery. Allen "interrogates his own place in the vacuum of art history in the only way he knows: by manipulating the nature of materials, a knotty, manifest language of the world", wrote critic Christina Catherine Martinez. Allen is representing the United States at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
Identity and overview
Identity and overview
The following is established of the heading itself.
Works and production
Works and production
The following works and productions are recorded by name or by count. Sex hygiene: the anatomy, physiology, and hygiene of the sex organs / by Julia Kinberg-von Sneidern and Alma Sundquist; translated by Mary E. It is also recorded that the death-thorn: magic, superstitions, and beliefs of urban Indians in Panama and Peru / translated by Bernard Miall. Ordini circolari a tutti gli speziali dello stato ecclesiastico: avendoci supplicato gli speziali di quest' alma città di Roma di essere abilitati alla introduzione dall' estero, ed all' uso della china gialla per ritrarne il solfato di chinina. / P. Institutional cataloguing adds that the Virgin of the grotto.
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Further particulars
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This entry is compiled from 6 catalogued sources across 5 independent registers. The registers consulted are Crossref registry, The Art Institute of Chicago, Wellcome Collection, Wikidata and Wikipedia. Every statement above is held against the register that stated it; where the registers are silent, the entry is silent.
The Encyclopedia exists whether or not anything is for sale. Corrections are recorded rather than overwritten, and every version of this record is kept. Published 17 August 2026.
Elsewhere in Sculpture
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