American pavilion

The Biennale parent organization also hosts regular festivals in other arts: architecture, dance, film, music, and theater.

[2] The United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was constructed in 1930[3] by the Grand Central Art Galleries, a nonprofit artists' cooperative established in 1922 by Walter Leighton Clark together with John Singer Sargent, Edmund Greacen, and others.

"[5] In 1930, Walter Leighton Clark and the Grand Central Art Galleries spearheaded the creation of the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

[6][7] The pavilion's architects were William Adams Delano, who also designed the Grand Central Art Galleries, and Chester Holmes Aldrich.

As he wrote in the 1934 catalog: "Pursuing our purpose of putting American art prominently before the world, the directors a few years ago appropriated the sum of $25,000 for the erection of an exhibition building in Venice on the grounds of the International Biennial.

Every two years museum curators from across the U.S. detail their visions for the American pavilion in proposals that are reviewed by the NEA Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions (FACIE), a group comprising curators, museum directors and artists who then submit their recommendations to the public-private Fund for United States Artists at International Festivals and Exhibitions.

[12] Rauschenberg's selection for the 1964 Golden Lion marked the United States' ascendancy over European artistic dominance, and the entrance of pop art into canon.