In fact, the Art Museum last curated a show at the Biennale two decades ago, with a Jasper Johns exhibition - its only other time representing the nation in the Italian city.
"The museum has curated shows that have traveled the world, but Venice - it's like the Oscars. It all happens there," said Thora Jacobson, a Philadelphia art veteran now planning the contemporary-art event Philagrafika.
Nauman, 66, said he had "sort of mixed feelings" about the show.
"It's very much an honor to be invited, but on the other hand it involves a lot of older work, and it's hard to deal with that - having to rethink it, how to reinstall it," he said. "Even though that's supposed to be the curator's job, you can't avoid taking part. But I do enjoy Venice - and that's the good part."
Nauman, who was born in Fort Wayne, Ind., and raised in Milwaukee, steered a career path that took him first to California and then New Mexico.
He has no particular ties to Philadelphia, but a number of events have coalesced around the museum's choice to present his work.
After trying for years, the museum recently bought the artist's proof for The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, a seminal 1967 piece that appropriated the usually commercial medium of neon as a vehicle for the wordplay that would figure strongly in much of his work.
Nauman's work has been seen often at the Biennale, and in 1999 he won the festival's Golden Lion award. One of his chief proponents has been Robert Storr, the 2007 director of the Biennale, whom the Art Museum engaged in 2005 as consulting curator of modern and contemporary art.
The fusing of these factors was not part of any master plan, d'Harnoncourt said. "It was not a strategy. Coincidence is one word, but I guess I'd go more for serendipity."
