Alma Allen's Not Yet Titled (2022), installed at his Tepoztián studio near Mexico City.
Photo: Diego Flores. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York
Creative Mind: Alma Allen
The artist blends ancient methods, such as carving and shaping, with modern technology to produce his large-scale installations, which reflect the human touch
Alma Allen. Photo: Diego Flores. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York.
Alma Allen’s new sculptures, made variously of onyx, marble, and bronze, evince a genius at the top of his game. Taking over Manhattan’s Park Avenue Malls, the hallowed public art platform that has hosted the likes of Alex Katz, Yoshitomo Nara, and Niki de Saint Phalle, ten of the artist’s creaturely forms will be found along a series of green oases from East 52nd to East 70th Streets this spring.
“There are all of these spirally, energetic sort of twists, almost like a shoot or an energy, coming out of the ground in some of the locations where there are often plants,” Allen says of the works’ response to their prominent Upper East Side location. “They have this new-plant energy of trying to find the sun.”
Working from an expansive foundry in Tepoztlán, Mexico, an hour south of Mexico City—his home base since 2017—Allen sees this project as an evocative homecoming. “When I moved to New York at 19 years old, I was super excited and I spent the entire first day I was there walking from Park Slope to Harlem,” says the self-taught artist, who was raised in a Mormon household in Heber City, Utah. “I’d read so many books about New York, things that had taken place and artists who had lived there. It was sort of this unreal world in my imagination. I’ve been trying to find that moment in time.”
Alma Allen's Not Yet Titled (2022), installed at his Tepoztián studio near Mexico City. Photo: Diego Flores. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York
"Nunca Solo" at Anahuacalli. Photo: Diego Flores. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York.
Unique process: Allen blends ancient methods, such as carving and shaping, with modern technology to produce his large-scale installations, which reflect the human touch. He hand-molds clay and wax maquettes—an intuitive process, he says—before carving stone and wood with a self-built robotic arm, then applying artist-made patinas to the final product.
Alma Allen at Kasmin, New York, in 2020. Photo: Diego Flores. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin
Individual expression: “I don’t fit very well into any kind of artistic movement,” Allen muses about his physio-futuristic bent, although he does consider the Surrealist-heavy Louise Bourgeois a seminal inspiration. “I’ve always been fascinated by using art as a kind of mechanism to try to peer around the corners of reality,” he says. “Sometimes I’m working very continuously, almost like in a trance state. I can meditate by carving stone or hammering away for hours and hours.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2025 Spring Issue under the headline “Creative Minds.” Subscribe to the magazine.
"Nunca Solo" at Anahuacalli. Photo: Diego Flores. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York
Cover: Alma Allen's Not Yet Titled (2022), installed at his Tepoztián studio near Mexico City.
Photo: Diego Flores. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York
