Alma Allen

Biography

Alma Allen (b. 1970, Heber City, UT) began his practice by hand carving salvaged materials into unique small objects. Allen moved to New York in his early twenties and sold the miniature carvings on the street in SoHo, before catching the attention of designers nearby. After almost a decade in New York, Allen relocated to Los Angeles where he began designing furniture and creating large-scale sculptures. After repeated injury from obsessive over-carving left Allen unable to use his hands for extended periods, the artist built a robotic system out of spare assembly line parts and developed its proprietary software as a mechanized extension of hand-carving. Primarily constructed in stone, wood, and bronze, Allen’s sculptures are reminiscent of those by Constantin Brancusi and Isamu Noguchi, reflecting their ardor for experimentation, expressiveness, and originality. Allen’s process is organic and the material itself often dictates the final form—whether anthropomorphic or non-representational. 

Alma Allen participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, where he gained recognition and a wider discovery of his work. In 2023, Allen’s solo exhibition, Nunca Solo, opened at Museo Anahuacalli in Mexico City. Recent group exhibitions include the deSaisset Museum, Santa Clara, CA and Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. In Conversation: Alma Allen & JB Blunk, a two-person exhibition that began at the Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA in February 2018, traveled to the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno in Spring 2019. This exhibition staged an encounter between two artists who never met but whose work shares a deep affinity. The art of Alma Allen and JB Blunk blurs the line between design and sculpture, with both artists creating evocative organic work from natural materials. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA and the Palm Springs Art Museum, CA and his first monograph was published by Rizzoli Electa in 2020. Allen currently lives and works in Tepoztlán, Mexico.

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