Al-An deSouza
“Underlying this work is a consideration of what is place, who and what is in place, and what is out of place by having been displaced. Those kinds of questions, without them manifesting overtly, without them forming the outward skin of the work, as it were, are linked personally to my own experience of being diasporic, of mobility,
and being unfixed.”
Al-An deSouza
An ambitious watercolor project connects the museum collection to moments of beauty in overlooked places, starting with the ground beneath our feet.
The Asian Art Museum
Table Settings, 2025 (Detail)
This monumental watercolor work was created by the artist Al-An deSouza in response to the galleries of the Asian Art Museum. Impressions of forms, colors, and shapes on display coalesce with patterns and images drawn from Al-An’s practice of photographing the streets while walking. Their attention to “the cracks and stains, signage and markings, bumps and dips, potential slips and trips–the geometry and architecture that directs pedestrians” offers an index of the present moment, and the process of making the work. Created setting by setting over months at a living room table, the piece holds various rhythms of daily life and an attention to its production. Each session began with a pot of tea, remnants of which form the ground of the work. These “first marks were both deliberate and allowing chance,” Al-An recounts, “and that’s how I proceeded.” At times recognizable — the circular pattern of a manhole cover, the gait of a pedestrian signal, the intestinal curves reminiscent of a Spirograph, or the transfer imprint of a Lincoln penny — the work also creates a certain ambiguity or chaos held together by an encircling border inscribed with symbols and the words ex uno pluria, “from the one to the many.”
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Al-An deSouza’s works have been exhibited globally including at The Pompidou Centre, Paris; Moderna Museet, Sweden; Mori Art Museum, Japan; Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa; Hayward Gallery, UK; International Center of Photography, NY; Stedelijk Museum, The Netherlands; Museum Kunst Palast, Germany; Museo Tamayo, Mexico; Memphis Brooks Museum, TN; Museum for African Art, NY; Smithsonian Museum, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Gwangju Biennale, Korea; 3rd Guangzhou Triennale, China; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF; Fowler Museum, LA; Blaffer Art Museum, TX; and Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL. In 2011, on an invitation by The Phillip’s Collection, deSouza created The World Series in response to Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, and their work was subsequently featured in a solo exhibition at the museum along with Lawrence’s works. They were featured in an expansive solo at The Johnson Museum at Cornell University, NY.
Al-An deSouza was born in 1958 in Nairobi, Kenya to immigrant parents of Indian descent and grew up in the United Kingdom. They graduated from the Bath Academy of Fine Art, England with a BA in Fine Art, participated in the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and obtained their MFA in Photography from UCLA, Los Angeles. deSouza’s publications include “How Art Can Be Thought: A Handbook for Change” in which they examine how art is discussed, valued and taught within a politicized global culture while in their novel Ark of Martyrs the artist pens a fictional rewrite of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness blending poetry, rap and prose through a contemporary prism.
Al-An deSouza lives and work in the Bay Area, California, where they are a professor in the Department of Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley.