Actor Says He Removed His Mother’s Art from Venice Biennale Installation as a Pro-Israel Protest

Actor Eric Rasmussen revealed this week that he had removed his contribution to an installation by Denniston Hill in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale because the residency program appeared to support the “eradication” of Israel, in Rasmussen’s view.

In an op-ed published by the Jewish Journal on Monday, Rasmussen wrote that he had combined two drawings by his mother of Adolf Hitler drawn from a notebook she kept during her childhood. The resulting work, transferred to an acetate panel, was included Denniston Hill’s installation, an exquisite corpse–style work titled Chimera (2026) that is located in the Giardini section of Koyo Kouoh’s main exhibition.

The piece features contributions by dozens of past residents at Denniston Hill, which was cofounded by artists kara lynch, Julie Mehretu, Paul Pfeiffer, and Jessica Rankin, along with art historian Lawrence Chua and curator Beth Stryker, and is located in Upstate New York. Rasmussen was a resident at Denniston Hill in 2019 through the DPAA Workshop.

Rasmussen said his submission to Chimera was a 1943 drawing by his mother that he had previously enlisted in a performance staged during his Denniston Hill residency. The piece is a drawing of a mustachioed man and some numbers, along with text reading, “Mister Hitler is invaded and his spitting.” For the Venice Biennale, he added a caption in red: “Mom’s childhood drawing 1943. The Toxicity of the Past?”

“I felt like the piece reflected the work I did at Denniston Hill while, at the same time, gesturing toward our current moment,” Rasmussen writes. “Neither the ‘toxicity’ of authoritarian leaders nor the rabid antisemitism called to mind by Hitler’s image remain in the past.”

ARTnews was able to confirm that the drawing did make it on view in time for the Biennale’s opening in May by examining installation shots of Chimera disseminated by the exhibition, which closes later this month.

It appears to have been taken away by Rasmussen at some point after mid-May, when, he wrote, Denniston Hill sent an email noting that the organization was more than 70 Biennale participants who had signed an open letter that objected to the Biennale’s claims of political neutrality. The signatories said this conflicted with the controversial decision this year to host pavilions for Israel, Russia, and the United States, all of which are “current regimes committing war crimes,” the letter said.

Moreover, according to Rasmussen, Denniston Hill wrote that it was “aligning with ANGA,” or the Art Not Genocide Alliance, a group that has repeatedly protested Israel’s presence at the Biennale while also noting that Palestine has no official pavilion in the show, and never has. (Palestine is not considered a state in Italy; only countries viewed as states by Italy’s government can have national pavilions at the Biennale, per the exhibition.)

“ANGA clearly considers all of Israel to be occupied Palestine and its goal is not to oppose policies of the government of Israel but to destroy the nation,” Rasmussen claimed in his Jewish Journal essay, which alleged that Denniston Hill has “no problem blithely aligning itself with an organization that seeks that nation’s eradication without even asking for the opinions of its artists.”

His essay also labeled anti-Zionism “an assault on not only the Jewish state and Jewish history, but also on language itself,” and claimed that linking “Zionism with racism, colonialism and apartheid” was akin to “Cold War KGB propaganda.”

Without stating a precise date for the work’s removal, Rasmussen said he “wrote a lengthy email” to Denniston Hill seeking the return of the drawing. Denniston Hill obliged the request and gave back the drawing, he said.

Representatives for Denniston Hill and the Biennale did not respond to requests for comment.