Words Michael Snyder Photography Fabian Martinez

Published in No 18

In early February of 2023, an army of 25 bronzes — accompanied by a solitary boomerang of burnished charcoal-gray Santo Tomás marble — quietly invaded Mexico City’s Museo Anahuacalli, a volcanic stone temple conceived in the early 1940s to house Diego Rivera’s collection of pre-Hispanic sculpture. Made by the Utah-born artist Alma Allen, the bronzes gleamed in the sepulchral shadows of the museum’s lower galleries and refracted sunshine in the soaring uppermost rooms. In one mosaic-lined space at the building’s rear, a conch shell emerged from turquoise swirls of patinated metal; elsewhere, a gargantuan moth alighted on a basalt wall, looking down on dense, liquid swirls of bronze reaching into space with delicate tentacles like lures on anglerfish.

These creatures — some immediately recognizable, others still on their way into being — seemed to communicate at an otherworldly frequency. “I usually assign myself an audience when I make work,” Allen told me on a warm January day at the Mexico City home he shares with his wife, the writer and curator Su Wu, and their two children, ages five and two. At Anahuacalli, humans were secondary. “Here, my audience was all those figures,” he said, the people and animals made from stone and clay, most many centuries, if not millennia, old, that occupy the building’s stone niches and glass display cases. “This was my attempt to communicate with them.”

Born into a large Mormon family in 1970, Allen has always been drawn to the thin veil between reality and the supernatural, a sensibility absorbed from a faith built on visions of angels and conversations with God. Though Allen rejected Mormonism from an early age, he’s never fully shaken the idea, as he puts it, “that the existence I’m experiencing isn’t quite real.” As a kid, Allen wandered off from his family home in Heber City to fish in nearby lakes and search for petroglyphs in the red-rock hills. He also immersed himself in art books and novels passed to him by librarians and school instructors sympathetic to his restlessness and skepticism. In the sixth grade, one teacher gave him a copy of The Sound and the Fury, which, though confounding, opened his eyes to the possibilities “of the interior voice of a person — that confusing inner monologue that looked, maybe, like what it really is to think.” That automatic approach to creation, the opening of space to “accidently stumble upon something,” would go on to shape his creative process.

At 16, Allen left home for good, eventually winding up in a Bay Area squat house with a community of other dispossessed kids. Seven years later, in 1993, Allen headed east to New York, where the city treated him with its customary brutality. Hit by a truck not long after his arrival, Allen, practically immobilized, started selling miniature sculptures from an ironing board on Prince Street, peculiar amulets that played at the edges of utility and figuration. As he developed a small but devoted circle of clients, Allen turned the city into a training ground and scrapyard, collecting chunks of marble from broken curbs and visiting The Met every week. Eventually, his finances stabilized and, whenever the weather turned too frigid, he would book a flight to Las Vegas, rent a car and “just drive to Arizona and New Mexico and collect stones.” In 2000, he bought a house in East Kingston, New York, which he spent a year restoring. But the long, freezing winters proved too taxing and, in September of 2001, he decided to go back to the city. “I rented a truck and was meant to move into this apartment, and I just couldn’t do it,” he says. He renegotiated the contract for the moving van and, a few days later headed west, this time to Los Angeles, a city where he would, once again, be a complete stranger.

The sale of the upstate house generated enough income that, not long after arriving in LA, Allen managed to buy ten acres of land in Joshua Tree. There, he built a house and studio which he shared with his former partner, Nancy Pearce, and their daughter, who is now 14 years old. He also scaled his work larger and larger, drawing strange, amorphous forms from burls of wood and pale white masses of Coloradan marble, sculptures that seemed to express not so much the artist’s inner life as that of the materials themselves. By 2006, “All those years of using grinders and chisels and hammers took their toll,” he says, resulting in crippling stress fractures that radiated up his forearms and carpal tunnel syndrome that rendered his hands all but useless. With help from an insistent collector, Allen purchased a robotic arm that became a kind of enormous prosthetic, allowing him to work in more forgiving materials like clay and wax, then scale his sculptures up with computers.

Despite the introduction of these new technologies, Allen’s talismans maintained his delicate, spontaneous touch. Fingerprints left on a piece of clay might find themselves subtly etched into stone, as if the objects had been crafted not by Allen — an unassuming presence whose ice-blue eyes you’re unlikely to catch for more than a microsecond at a time — but rather by one of the Angels he left behind in Utah. Like the pre-Hispanic figures at Anahuacalli, Allen’s works “are not abstractions or formal exercises,” he says. They are, instead, mnemonics for a story that he prefers to leave obscure, personal fetishes and inscrutable totems linked by their shared, eternally mutable name: Not Yet Titled.

Had everything gone as planned, Allen’s wanderings would have ceased in Joshua Tree. When he bought his land out in the desert, surrounded by russet rocks and hydra-headed yuccas, Allen had no neighbors. But in the course of 15 years, people moved in. Eventually, a yoga retreat, whose affluent attendees had little patience for the grind of chainsaws, opened next door. “They made formal complaints and they won, so I lost my permit to operate at home,” Allen says. “It was frustrating to have built the house and studio where I thought I’d work for the rest of my life and then lose my right to work there.” Allen and Wu, who met in 2014 when he contacted her to write about his works for the exhibition catalogue of that year’s Whitney Biennial (“He somehow got my number and texted ‘I’ve tried with several other people and you are my last resort,’” she recalls), realized quickly that it would be futile to fight the Southern Californian wellness-industrial complex. They thought about moving back into Los Angeles proper or even somewhere in Europe. Then, in early 2017, the couple came to Mexico City and Wu, enchanted, decided to rent a house.

It took about a year for Allen to relocate fully, but within six months of moving, he stumbled upon a warehouse space in Tepoztlán, a picturesque village about an hour’s drive outside the city. Hemmed in by a sculptural phalanx of ancient lava flows, eroded through millions of years into sheer cliffs draped in jungle, Tepoztlán has long been popular among artists and filmmakers seeking respite from the frenetic capital, but unable, for reasons both practical and social, to fully escape its gravitational pull. At his bodega, located near the edge of town, Allen installed his robotic arm along with 3D printers and a foundry, where he casts not only the sculptures themselves but also the welding rods he uses to assemble them. The larger space has also allowed Allen to hire more assistants and, in turn, nurture his creatures to elephantine maturity. “The work has always had a certain gesture, a certain life, where they feel like bodies or entities in some way,” says Nick Olney, President of Kasmin Gallery in New York, which has represented Allen since 2019. “But Mexico has enabled him to work at larger scales and to really control every step of the process.”

It’s also given him access to one of the world’s most robust, ancient carving traditions. On long road trips with his family, Allen will stop at even the most undistinguished village church to see what local stone was used for its construction; often, those stops will lead to nearby quarries where he buys off-cuts whose irregular shapes determine what the final sculpture can and should become. He’s also made week-long pilgrimages to visit the monolithic stone heads carved millennia ago by the Olmec, the most ancient known civilization in Mesoamerica. Unlike Egyptian and Roman statuary, where the sculptor’s hand disappears under the rigid constraints of physiological and ritual perfection, the Olmec works suggest to Allen the intentionality of individual artists. He describes the celebrated Olmec wrestler, a jewel in the collection of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, as “maybe the greatest work ever made by a human, like a soul trying to climb out of itself.” The description bears a striking resemblance to Olney’s account of Allen’s sculptures: “They’re about transformation and moving between planes,” he says, “the life of objects and how they might interact with us in our lives, too” — what happens, in other words, when we lift the veil between a reality where things are understood as either living or not to reveal a parallel order in which life itself is a spectrum, where silent objects speak, whether we hear them or not.

Since moving to Mexico and shifting the studio to Tepoztlán, Allen and Wu have also acquired a piece of land at the foot of the mountains where they’ve started to build a home, an ambitious, fractured project that has grown from a single room to a compound of eleven separate structures — “my world to be old in,” as Allen puts it. He collects run-down cars that he uses to rattle through town or bump along the highway to Cuernavaca, the closest city, where his daughter goes to school. Though he comes into Mexico City with relative frequency to complete basic logistical tasks, he tends to find the experience draining. “I have better ideas when I’m in nature. When I’m in the city, I just have to nap,” he jokes.

Recently, he’s dialed in on a process built around the repetition of automatic gestures — Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness relayed through a pair of broken hands. In recent works for his upcoming solo show at Kasmin, set to open in May, this has meant rolling long, thick strands of clay into spontaneous, malformed sailor’s knots, only a few of which will eventually pass through the longer, more arduous process of scanning, expanding, printing and casting. “The artistic decision is setting up the process,” he says. “I feel like these pieces need to carry the tension that happens in that moment.” Though made from classical materials often associated with the idea of permanence, Allen’s sculptures read as aleatory records of that momentary creative act, fortuitous and thrillingly temporary. They’re not exactly conduits for an otherworldly consciousness, he told me that afternoon in January — Allen’s art is not a séance. Still, he says, “I have a hard time convincing myself that there isn’t something happening outside of my intention.”

 The monumental landscapes where Allen has chosen to spend most of his adult life nourish that sense of tension and transformation. Disinclined toward elaborate explications of his work or what lays behind it — “If somebody else comes to my work with a fresh interpretation, I wouldn’t want to take that away from them,” he says — Allen describes his interest in these places simply. “I’m attracted to Tepoztlán because of the mountains, because of the forms they take on,” he says. “The landscapes are very active. You hike through the rock formations and, if you go 50 feet down the trail, they look completely different.” The landscape is a screen, capturing little snapshots of a fluid, protean reality just beyond our grasp. Seen that way, the mountains are nothing less than clouds calcified into rock, creatures that come alive the moment we turn our backs, constantly revealing new characters, new beings they’ve yet to become.

Michael Snyder is a freelance journalist and Contributing Editor for T: The New York Times Style Magazine based in Mexico City. His work has appeared in Saveur, The Nation, Lucky Peach, The Believer, Travel + Leisure and the Los Angeles Times, among others.

Photographer Fabian Martinez contributes to Openhouse, Ark Journal, AD, Dwell, and Wallpaper, among others. He is represented by Unidos.world @fabianml