Block. (Courtesy the Bronx Museum)

One could almost trace the career of Holly Block through biennials. So the selection of a program she oversaw for the 2013 Venice Biennale, which opens next June, is not much of a surprise.

In 1994, she led a group of intrepid museum directors, curators, critics and artists down to Cuba during the embargo to attend the Fifth Havana Biennial. In 2003, she and James Farber co-commissioned the Cairo Biennial, with the support of the State Department. In 2010, under her direction, the Bronx Museum was charged with administering a $1 million cultural diplomacy initiative called SmARTPower. Then in 2011, Ms. Block brought the biennial flair to the backyard of the Bronx Museum when the Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program (an artist residency program founded in 1980, and one of the museum’s trophies) staged its own for the first time.

The Venice Biennale, arguably the world’s most prestigious international art festival, doesn’t seem like a stretch for Ms. Block so much as the last item on a 20-year “to-do” list. What is a surprise is that the program comes from the Bronx Museum, where Ms. Block is director.

For the museum, it was a windfall. Under the guidance of Ms. Block and independent curator Carey Lovelace, the institution, which is hosting a party for its 40th anniversary on Friday, put together a proposal presenting the work of installation artist Sarah Sze and was granted the unique privilege of commissioning the U.S. Pavilion of the Venice Biennale.

The U.S. Pavilion regularly sees commissions by long-established contemporary art museums with competitive programming, large curatorial teams and large endowments. The past decade has seen commissions by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago and the List Visual Arts Center at MIT.

The Bronx Museum, on the other hand, is a small institution in an economically disadvantaged area that doesn’t have a generous endowment or long-term philanthropic funders. “We’re located in the poorest Congressional district in the country,” said board chairman Douglass Rice in an interview with The Observer. “For our museum to have been chosen to represent the United States at the Biennale is a great honor for us and the Bronx.”

The prominence of the Bronx Museum is a testament to the revitalization of the Bronx as a whole. “BMA isn’t a city-funded window dressing project anymore,” said board member, artist and longtime Bronx resident Tim Rollins, who has known Ms. Block since the ’80s. “It’s not a shiny object in a shit pile. It’s vital. I wouldn’t be involved otherwise.”

With an annual budget of $3.4 million—which is equivalent to its projected budget for the commission of the Venice Biennale alone, and small potatoes when compared with the budgets of other New York museums like MoMA, with $231.4 million in expenses for the 2010-2011 tax year—how does an institution strapped for resources even conceive of an exhibition of such caliber?

Enter Ms. Block. Having first worked as a curator at the Bronx Museum from 1985 to 1988, she returned in 2006 after an 18-year hiatus, during which time she served as executive director of the scrappy nonprofit alternative space Art in General in Lower Manhattan. She arrived in the Bronx just in time for the opening of the museum’s $19 million building expansion by Miami firm Arquitectonica, which doubled its size, upping it to 10,000 square feet of exhibition space, and enhanced its education facilities. Her arrival was met with much anticipation. As Carol Vogel put it in The New York Times, “After years of internal struggles, spotty programming and an overall lack of vision, the 35-year-old Bronx Museum of the Arts is bracing for a metamorphosis.”

But no one said metamorphoses were easy going, especially during a financial downturn. The museum underwent severe budget cuts and staff layoffs in 2008 and 2009. In the first few months of her tenure, the staff shrank from 28 to 22. The registrar, full-time preparator and assistant curator positions were dismantled. Full-time curator Lydia Yee left the museum. Still, it remained an invigorating place.

“It was an environment that was supportive of the community but also had the eyes and ears of the art world, even though a lot of people didn’t make it out to the shows,” said Rod Malin, who worked at the museum as a freelance tech specialist and museum designer at the time of its transition. “And funding was always an issue.”

Ms. Block set to work on that problem.

One thing she did was to beef up the museum’s galas. In the past they’d been infrequent, but she made them an annual event, starting with 2008’s “Spring Gala: A Bronx Feast,” an affair complete with towering floral centerpieces, a dinner of “Bronx cuisines,” a silent auction and a musical performance by the Dave Valentin Quintet. The most recent one, in May 2012, netted almost $300,000, 15 to 20 percent of which was from individual donations—way up from the $6,000 in individual donations the museum had in 2002. And since Ms. Block was hired, the board has grown from 15 members to 27, including Ms. Block and Mr. Rice.

But it’s not all glitz and glad-handing. Ms. Block’s interest in community development dates to when she was a college student at Bennington College in Vermont in the early ’80s, and then interned at the Washington Project for the Arts, a nonprofit in D.C. whose mission was to provide resources to struggling regional artists. Around that same time, she became politically active. “That kind of commitment and engagement really informed everything that she does in a true way,” said Ms. Lovelace, Ms. Block’s co-curator for the Venice pavilion, who met Ms. Block nearly 20 years ago when they were both involved in feminist activist groups. “The idea of reaching out to different cultures and bringing the neighborhood in is important to her. It’s not like there’s this big museum on the hill.”

Under Ms. Block, the Bronx Museum has a stronger reputation than ever as a community center. On a recent Friday afternoon, Rieva Lesonsky, the CEO of GrowBiz Media, gave a lecture on social media for small businesses that was attended by locals like wine merchant Ismael Robledo, who told The Observer he was creating YouTube videos in Spanish “to get Puerto Ricans interested in wine.” But, she insisted, that is still only part of what it does: “The mission of the museum has always been one-third exhibitions, one-third education and one-third marketing.”

All of this community-mindedness comes with an eye toward creating an “elite aesthetic experience” (as per Mr. Rollins) while keeping it real and integrating arts into the general neighborhood rather than fostering an exclusive art bubble, as is happening in neighborhoods like Mott Haven. “It feels like a Thanksgiving Day table,” said Mr. Rollins, “where all kinds of folks who might ordinarily not get together come together to feast on exhibitions, concerts and lectures.”

Ms. Block’s brand of tough down-home elegance is, according to Mr. Rollins, what makes it all work. “Excellence and democracy are not polar opposites,” he said. “What Holly possessed, then and now, is this unforced grace.”

Attendance increased from 500 people in March to 1,500 in April. Back in 2006, Mr. Malin said, the AIM openings were always well-attended, but during the week “it was dead.” These days, the picture is different. Monica Espinel, the guest curator of “Urban Archives: The Rituals of Chaos,” a show that’s currently on view, says the museum always seems very busy to her.

That is probably at least partly due to the decision, in March, to toss its $5 admission charge and become free, a bold move at a time when other museums have been upping their entrance fees. (In September 2011, MoMA raised its from $20 to $25.) For Ms. Block, the decision was partly personal. “I grew up in D.C., and the Smithsonian was free,” she said. “Having access to a museum was hugely important to my life.” The cut came at the behest of a $62,000 grant from the New York Community Trust and was part of the museum’s pledge for it 40th anniversary to acquire 40 works of art and “adopt” 40 schools (meaning it will build an endowment that makes class trips free).

The Artist in the Marketplace program, which touts alumni such as Glenn Ligon, Anton Vidokle and Amy Cutler, is another example of the emphasis on education and outreach. It is structured to provide emerging artists with the tools they need to support themselves and their work, whether that means instruction in writing grant proposals and wall text, or help in developing networking skills. (The program has its skeptics. In a mostly jaundiced review of the first AIM Biennial, Ken Johnson wrote in The New York Times: “[M]ost of the work is nondescript and routinely derivative. So you can’t help wondering if programs like AIM are promising something that they cannot deliver. No amount of knowledge about how the art world works and no pragmatic tool kit can substitute for uncompromising drive, singular imagination and personal charisma.”)

Not that Ms. Block is all pragmatism. She has the requisite high-art edge and savvy for bringing in the deep pockets. The social media workshop attracted CBS reporter Charles Osgood and a UPS executive who flew in from San Diego. “This is my first time in the Bronx,” he told The Observer. Ms. Block has hired Julieta Gonzalez as an adjunct curator to work on the new acquisitions program.

Meanwhile, the museum has forged strong international connections. The SmartPower international artist-in-residence program has facilitated relationships with individuals and institutions in places like Brazil, Cuba and Senegal. “We’ve spent 40 years focusing internally,” said Ms. Block, “now we’re spending 40 years focusing externally.”

Her talent at scaling the museum’s art program to the international stage has not gone unnoticed. “Through Holly Block, the museum has been able to chart a course that looks at the local and the global,” said Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem. “She’s positioned the museum out in the world.”

But the Venice proposal also involves bringing a little of the world to the Boogie Down Bronx, at least online. In the fall, students from the museum’s Teen Council—which accepts 13 students a year into a program through which they interview artists in the Bronx and create DVD magazines for teenagers—will be leading a program that kicks off its Biennale commission.

“Teens in Venice and teens in the Bronx Museum program will work together through Skype and e-mail,” said Ms. Block. “It’s a great thing, because how many times is Venice going to be connected to the Bronx?”

rjovanovic@observer.com