Saturday, May 2, 2026 | 4:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public 

Join us for a lush retirement party in honor of artist and educator Al-An deSouza, whose decades-long career across pedagogy, fiction, and multimedia art has profoundly shaped contemporary discourse with wit, depth, and provocation.  

Once a genteel ritual of Victorian high society, the tea dance has since been reclaimed by queer communities as a celebration of daytime pleasure, collective joy, and radical visibility. The evening opens with a live reading by deSouza and a closing celebration inspired by the tea dance, an invitation to sip, swirl, and sway in a space where old-world frill meets raucous delight. 

About Al-An

Al-An deSouza is an artist working across photo-media, installation, text, and performance. Their artworks have been shown extensively in the US and internationally, including at Tate Britain, London; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Pompidou Centre, Paris, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul. deSouza’s two recent books: How Art Can Be Thought (Duke University Press, 2018), examines art pedagogy and critique, and how some of the most common terms used to discuss art may be adapted to new artistic and social challenges; Ark of Martyrs (Sming Sming Books, 2020), is a polyphonic, dysphoric replacement of Joseph Conrad’s infamous Heart of Darkness. deSouza is Professor of Photography in the department of Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley, and is represented by Talwar Gallery, New York and New Delhi.