With less than a month until the 61st Venice Biennale closes on 22 November, the commissioner of the United States pavilion, Jenni Parido, has appealed to donors for emergency funding to bring Alma Allen's sculptures home from Italy. Parido, who founded the American Arts Conservancy and commissioned Allen's exhibition, told supporters in a letter that the organisation was facing an urgent funding need tied to taking the show down and returning the works safely to the United States.

The letter was reviewed by the New York Times this week, and its contents underline how precarious the pavilion's finances have been from the start. Parido told Hyperallergic in April that Allen's exhibition, Call Me the Breeze, had received no corporate or foundation backing at all, and had instead been made possible by private individuals who believed in the importance of American artists and cultural exchange. An online donations portal was set up to support the presentation before it opened in May.

The funding scramble follows months of opacity around how the pavilion's artist and its financing were chosen, with the Trump administration-aligned nonprofit operating largely outside the usual institutional channels. The exhibition itself, a group of Allen's sculptures installed in and around the neoclassical pavilion in the Giardini, has been on view since the Biennale opened in May.

Whether the appeal succeeds will determine how smoothly the works leave Venice once the Biennale ends. The episode has become a talking point about the risks of funding a national pavilion almost entirely through private donations, with no institutional safety net when the bill for deinstallation and shipping comes due.