Quick Facts
Biography
Allan deSouza (born 1958) is a photographer and multi-media artist. He currently works in San Francisco, where he is the Chair of the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley.
Work
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, to parents originally from Goa, India, deSouza moved to London, England, when he was seven, and was educated in both the UK and the United States.DeSouza engages with issues of migration, relocation, and international travel in much of his work. 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".
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, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Museum for African Art in New York, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, and Talwar Gallery, which represents the artist, in New York and New Delhi.
Education and career
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 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 2012, deSouza was invited to participate in the Rockefeller Foundation Arts and Literary Arts Residency at the Bellagio Center in Lake Como, Italy.
Selected exhibitions
Solo exhibitions
- 2019: University of Seville, Building Paradise, Seville, Spain
University of Delaware, Allan deSouza, Newark, Delaware, US
- 2018: Krannert Art Museum, Through the Black Country, Champaign, IL, US
The Mary and Carter Thacher Gallery, Through the Black Country, San Francisco, CA, US
- 2017: Talwar Gallery, Through the Black Country, New York, NY, US
Townsend Center for the Humanities, Through the Black Country, Berkeley, CA, US
- 2015: Talwar Gallery, Notes from Afar, New York, NY, US
- 2014, California Museum of Photography, Ark of Martyrs, Riverside, CA
- 2013: Talwar Gallery, Painting Redux, New Delhi, India
- 2012: SFCamerawork, The World Series, San Francisco, CA, US
- 2011: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Close Quarters and Far Pavilions, San Francisco, CA, US
- The Phillips Collection, The World Series, Washington, DC, US.
- Talwar Gallery, Trysts Tropicales, New York, NY, US
- Fowler Museum at UCLA, His Masters' Tools, Los Angeles, CA, US
- 2010-2011: Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, The Farthest Point, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, US
- 2008: Talwar Gallery, (i don't care what you say) Those Are Not Tourist Photos, New York, NY, US
- 2005: Talwar Gallery, The Lost Pictures, New York, NY, US
- 2003: Talwar Gallery, people in white houses, New York, NY, US
- 2001: Art in General, Terrain, New York, NY, US
- Talwar Gallery, Allan DeSouza, New York, NY, US
Group exhibitions
- 2019: Pomona College Museum of Art, Stories: Selections from the Permanent Collection, Claremont, CA, US
- 2018: Asia Society Texas Center, New Cartographies, Houston, TX, US
Apexart, Light in Wartime, New York, NY, US
- 2017: Asia Society, Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions, New York, NY, US
- 2016: Van Every/Smith Museum Galleries, Contents Under Pressure, Davidson, NC, US
- 2015: Blaffer Art Museum, Time/Image, Houston, TX, US
Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL, US
The Phillips Collection, Intersections @5, works from the permanent collection, Washington, DC, US
- 2013: Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African Art, Earth Matters, Washington, DC, US
- Charles Allis and Villa Terrace Museums, Chasing Horizons, Milwaukee, WI, US
- 2011: Paris Photo, works from the Walther Collection Exhibition, Events of the Self, Paris, France
- 2010: The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Material Evidence, Manhattan, KS, US
- The Walther Collection, Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity, Neu-Ulm, Germany
- Centre Georges Pompidou, Dreamlands, Paris, France
- 2008: 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, w/- Yong Soon Min, China
- 2007: Mattress Factory, Double Consciousness, Pittsburgh, PA, US
- 2006: International Center for Photography, SNAP Judgments, New York, NY, US,
- REDCat Gallery, An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life, Los Angeles, CA, US
- 2005: Talwar Gallery, (desi)re, New York, NY, US
- 2004: Museum Kunstpalast, Africa Remix, Düsseldorf, Germany
- William Benton Museum of Art, Masala, Storrs Mansfield, CT, US
- 2003: Museum for African Art, Looking Both Ways, New York, NY, US
- 1998: New Museum, Urban Encounters, New York, NY, US
- 1997: Studio Museum in Harlem, Transforming the Crown, Harlem, New York, NY, US
- The Queens Museum, Out of India, Queens, NY, US
- 1993: Whitney Museum, Whitney Biennial, Video collaboration with Yong Soon Min, New York, NY, US
Performances
- 2009: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Bodies in Transit, Chapel Hill, NC, US
- 2008: New Geographies in Contemporary African Art, presentation, Flyboy, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, US
- 2003: Oboro Gallery, Will **** for Peace, collaboration w/Y.S. Min, Montreal, Canada
