Allan deSouza

Allan deSouza (born 1958) is a Kenyan-born American photographer, art writer, professor, and multi-media artist. He is of Indian descent and his work deals with issues of migration, relocation, and international travel. He works in the San Francisco Bay Area, and was the Chair of the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley from 2015 - 2022.

Early life and education
Allan deSouza was born in Nairobi, Kenya, to Indian parents originally from Goa, India. His parents had left Goa while it existed as a Portuguese colony. During the upheaval following Kenyan independence in 1962 when he was age 7, his family emigrated to London, England.

He was educated in both the UK and the United States. DeSouza attended Goldsmiths College in London, and earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Bath Academy of Art in 1983. He moved to the United States in 1992, participating in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and earning a master's in photography from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1997.

He was married to artist Yong Soon Min in 1992, whom he has collaborated with on artwork.

Career
He has written about contemporary art, contributing to publications such as the Los Angeles Times, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, Wolgan Art Monthly, and Third Text Journal, and has been invited as a lecturer to museums and universities across the globe, including Pratt Institute, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Seika University in Kyoto, Japan, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden.

DeSouza served as an Associate Professor and Chair of the New Genres department of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) from 2006 until 2012, when he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley as head of the Photography Department. In 2011, he was invited by The Phillip’s Collection to create in response to Lawrence’s Migration Series. The resulting artwork, The World Series, was subsequently featured in a solo exhibition at the museum along with Lawrence’s works. In 2012, deSouza was invited to participate in the Rockefeller Foundation Arts and Literary Arts Residency at the Bellagio Center in Lake Como, Italy.

DeSouza's work has been featured at museums and galleries including The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, Fowler Museum in Los Angeles, Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Krannert Art Museum in Champaign, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Museum for African Art in New York, Mori Art Museum in Japan, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, Stedelijk Museum in the Netherlands, Museo Tamayo in Mexico, and Talwar Gallery, which represents the artist, in New York and New Delhi.

Artwork
DeSouza engages with issues of migration, relocation, and international travel in much of his artwork. His photoworks, texts, and installations examine geography, culture, and personal and communal identity. Much of his work takes up themes and visual vocabulary of migration and diaspora; his series of photographic work, The World Series, for example, was created as a response to Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series. DeSouza is interested in movement, travel, dislocation, memory and time.

For the photographic series The Lost Pictures, deSouza placed a number of slides of old family photos around his house, deliberately allowing them to become scratched, faded, and covered in dust. DeSouza’s work, in the words of one critic, “explores...both memory and photography as means of recording and preserving the past from aging, loss, displacement, and historical change.” Although often based in historical figures or events, his work also incorporates "fiction, erasure, re-inscription, and (mis)translation".

Exhibitions
A list of select exhibitions by deSouza include:

Solo exhibitions
• 2022: Talwar Gallery,Flotsam (1926–2018), New York

• 2022: Herbert F. Johnson Museum Museum of Art, Elegies of Futures Past, Ithaca, NY

• 2019: University of Seville, Building Paradise, Seville, Spain

• 2019: University of Delaware, Allan deSouza – The Life of the Captain from The Letters and Journals of Visitaçao da Costa, Delaware

• 2018: Krannert Art Museum, ‘’Through the Black Country,‘’ Champaign, IL

• 2018: The Mary and Carter Thacher Gallery, Through the Black Country, San Francisco, CA

• 2017: Talwar Gallery, Through the Black Country, New York

• 2015: Talwar Gallery, Notes from Afar, New York

• 2014: California Museum of Photography, Ark of Martyrs, Riverside, CA

• 2012: Talwar Gallery, Painting Redux, New Delhi

• 2012 SFCamerawork, The World Series, San Francisco, CA

• 2011: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Close Quarters and Far Pavilions, San Francisco, CA

• 2011: The Phillips Collection, The World Series, Washington, DC

• 2011: Talwar Gallery, Trysts Tropicales, New York

• 2011: Fowler Museum at UCLA, His Masters' Tools, Los Angeles, CA

• 2010–2011: The Farthest Point, Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois

• 2008: Talwar Gallery,, New York

• 2005: Talwar Gallery, The Lost Pictures, New York

• 2003: Talwar Gallery, people in white houses, New York

• 2001: Art in General, Terrain, New York

• 2001:Talwar Gallery, Allan deSouza, New York

Group exhibitions
• 2021: Talwar Gallery, as the wind blows, New York

• 2019: Pomona College Museum of Art, ‘’Stories: Selections from the Permanent Collection,‘’ Claremont, CA

• 2018: Dakota Gallery “Navigational Pull: The Art of Migration” A collaboration with Western Washington University students, Bellingham Wa

• 2013: Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African Art, Earth Matters, Washington, DC

• 2013: Charles Allis and Villa Terrace Museums, Chasing Horizons, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

• 2011: Paris Photo, works from the Walther Collection Exhibition, Events of the Self, Paris

• 2010: The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Material Evidence, Manhattan, KS

• 2010: The Walther Collection, Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity, Neu-Ulm, Germany

• 2010: Centre Georges Pompidou, Dreamlands, Paris

• 2008: 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, with Yong Soon Min, China

• 2007: Mattress Factory, Double Consciousness, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

• 2006: International Center for Photography, SNAP Judgments, New York

• 2006: REDCat Gallery, An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life, Los Angeles, California

• 2005: Talwar Gallery,, New York City

• 2004: Museum Kunstpalast, Africa Remix, Düsseldorf

• 2004: William Benton Museum of Art, Masala, Storrs Mansfield, Connecticut

• 2003: Museum for African Art, Looking Both Ways, New York

• 1998: New Museum, Urban Encounters, New York

• 1997: Studio Museum in Harlem, Transforming the Crown, Harlem, New York City

• 1997: The Queens Museum, Out of India, Queens, New York City

• 1993: Whitney Museum, Whitney Biennial, Video collaboration with Yong Soon Min, New York

Performances

 * 2009: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Bodies in Transit, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
 * 2008: New Geographies in Contemporary African Art, presentation, Flyboy, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
 * 2003: Oboro Gallery, Will **** for Peace, collaboration with Yong Soon Min, Montreal, Canada