> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://theparnassian.com/en/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# In early September 2025 the US State Department, which is responsible for the American pavilion, formally notified the curator John Ravenal that his project with the artist Robert Lazzarini had been selected for the Venice Biennale
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/v-nachale-sentiabria-2025-goda-gosudarstvennyi-departament-ssha-kotoryi-otvechaet-za-amerikanskii-pavilon-ofitsialno-uvedomil-kuratora-dzhona-reivenela-chto-ego-proekt-s-khudozhnikom-ro/
- Published: 2026-07-29T10:21:46.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:31.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Art, Museums, Society

In early September 2025 the US State Department, which is responsible for the American pavilion, formally notified the curator John Ravenal that his project with the artist Robert Lazzarini had been selected for the Venice Biennale. The project was called History Maker, and its institutional partner and sponsor was the University of South Florida Institute for Research in Art.

But somewhat later the artist was turned down, the reason given being a lack of funding, since by then the funding agreement between the State Department and the University of South Florida had been terminated. The university had been unable to raise a sum of about 5 million dollars in very short order. And given the cuts to the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts under Trump, no one managed to devise a way out.

Lazzarini himself, however, publicly linked the collapse of the project to political interference. According to the curator John Ravenal, when a new organisation, the American Arts Conservancy, received the role of institutional commissioner of the pavilion, it took the entire process into its own hands and set about doing what officials do best: corruption and cronyism. If one considers that the body is headed by Jenni Parido, who previously kept a pet food shop and is connected with Trump's circle, then everything adds up.

In November 2025 the State Department announced that the project of Lazzarini and Ravenal was being replaced by a project by Alma Allen, curated by Jeffrey Uslip, while the American Arts Conservancy retained the role of sponsor of the pavilion; in the end that exhibition was described as one of the emptiest at the Biennale and deeply depressing.

But, naturally, the Trump-linked organisation headed by a saleswoman of pet supplies, who dispatched her pocket artist, stayed in clover.

Now Lazzarini is preparing to show in Boston, at an exhibition at the MassArt Art Museum, the trembling American flags and the mathematically distorted sculptures of Washington and the bald eagle, which call American identity into question and which had been prepared for the American pavilion.