Andres Serrano proposes Donald Trump mausoleum for US pavilion at the Venice Biennale

It began in 2019 with the $1,880 purchase of a miniature chocolate wedding cake given to guests at President Donald Trump’s marriage to Melania Knauss in 2005. Since then, the US artist Andres Serrano has spent more than $200,000 amassing an archive of thousands of Trump-signed and branded objects. Now Serrano is proposing his multi-media portrait of the president be shown in the US pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale.

“I can think of no one better to represent America than the president himself,” Serrano says in a statement.

Trump appears to have already endorsed the project, titled The Game: All Things Trump, which is also available as a book. Last August, the then-presidential candidate was pictured posing with a copy of the volume at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

But Serrano, who was born in New York to Afro-Cuban and Honduran parents, insists his project is neither a celebration nor denigration of the US president. “I’m not a judge of anything, only an observer,” the artist tells The Art Newspaper. “Donald Trump was elected twice as the president so if you believe in democracy, you have to say the people have spoken. Politics are everywhere, even on the kitchen table. There’s a fine line between politics and entertainment. The media is happy to give us both in the same breath.”

For the prestigious Venice exhibition, which next year coincides with the 250th anniversary of the US’s declaration of independence, Serrano plans to install his project as a mausoleum, as if presenting a snapshot of a bygone era. The artist’s proposal also includes Serrano’s 2022 film, Insurrection, which captures the chaos and violence that ensued when Trump supporters stormed Congress on 6 January 2021. After the riots, Serrano spent months combing the internet for photographs and videos of the uprising, much of which was uploaded to conservative social media platforms like Parler. The film also delves into 250 years of US history through archival and historical footage.

Serrano’s own history with Trump goes back more than two decades—to 2004 when Trump sat for the artist’s America series, which includes images of ordinary citizens alongside A-list celebrities such as Snoop Dogg and Chloe Sevigny. “I took Donald Trump’s portrait for my America series because he was the embodiment of the American Dream: a successful businessman, entrepreneur, real estate mogul and celebrity,” Serrano says.

The artist has a long history of photographing high-profile individuals. He took the last public portrait of the US financier and convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019, shortly before Epstein’s imprisonment and death while he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Serrano tells The Art Newspaper that Epstein “didn’t say much” during their encounter. “I don’t know anything about Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship with anyone,” he adds. “I only met him.”

Trump’s relationship with Epstein is under scrutiny once more. Earlier this month, the US Justice Department announced its determination that Epstein had died by suicide and that there was no “client list” that could be released. The announcement sparked uproar among many, including Trump’s supporters, who believed fresh information about the Epstein case would expose ties to global elites.

In another twist, The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Trump sent a letter to Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003. The letter reportedly includes several lines of text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn using a thick marker. The letter concludes: “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump denied to The Wall Street Journal that he had written the letter or drawn the picture, saying: “This is not me. This is a fake thing.” He is now suing the paper and its owner, the media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

It is not clear whether the birthday letter was part of the Trump administration’s recent review of documents, but the report has sparked debate over Trump’s own artistic talents—even if the president wrote on Truth Social in response to the Wall Street Journal article: “I don’t draw pictures.”

Serrano thinks the president “is a good artist”. He adds: “I believe that many of the objects in The Game: All Things Trump, reflect his sense of design, whether he designed them or they were designed for him. He had a hand in them. He has a keen eye. He knows a good visual when he sees one. You might even call him a conceptual artist.”

Serrano submitted his Venice Biennale proposal earlier this month to the US State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) after the application portal was opened in early May—several months later than usual. The portal is due to close on 30 July, and a decision is expected to be announced on 1 September, leaving an unusually tight turnaround for the selected artist.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)—one of the government agencies Trump has threatened to eliminate in his federal budget—is responsible for convening a panel to review submissions for the US pavilion. According to the US State Department grant website, the jurors “have not yet been publicly announced”. Serrano’s relationship with the NEA is chequered; the grant body helped fund the artist’s 1987 photograph, Piss Christ, of a plastic crucifix submerged in Serrano’s own urine. Conservative politicians and religious groups bitterly denounced the work, catapulting Serrano to the centre of the so-called culture wars in the late-1980s and leading to greater scrutiny around NEA grants.

Whoever is selected to represent the US will be awarded a grant of up to $375,000, while $125,000 must be made available to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice to staff and maintain the US pavilion during the exhibition and its deinstallation, for approximately seven months. It is not clear whether there is a formal legal agreement between the museum and the US department of state.

According to new guidelines issued by the ECA when the submission portal was opened, the winning exhibition should emphasise “American exceptionalism”. Applications will be judged “on their capacity to advance US foreign policy and promote American values while maintaining a ‘non‐political character’”, the submission form states. Grant documents have also been edited to remove references to diversity, equality and inclusion.

Serrano is not sure that his proposed exhibition is political. “I see it more as being apolitical,” he says, “but there’s always politics at the Venice Biennale, it’s the politics of political correctness.”

The far-right blogger and coder Curtis Yarvin, whose radical idea of politics has won audiences with the likes of J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, has also submitted a proposal for the US pavilion. According to a video clip shared with Vanity Fair, Yarvin plans to “Trumpify the Venice Biennale this year”. He adds: “To give that world control at the Venice Biennale would be the absolutely most fucked-up manoeuvre ever. He has the executive power to piss on the process. We’re gonna go in and reconstruct the American arts with one violent executive order and take over the whole fucking thing.”