Black Cat Revolution
Dorian Reid: Calling All Cats!
MoAD
(Museum of the African Diaspora — SF)
September 30 — December 6
Come for the cats. Stay for the world they have built around them.
Dorian Reid tells the story of her Black Car Revolution through ceramics, protest signs, flags and performance, linking Black Panther history and animal welfare. Beginning in 2024 and working out of Richmond’s NIAD Center (Nuturring Independence through Artistic Development), Reid has staged annual traditions like the Friday the 13th demonstrations during Black History Month, where artists and staff wear all black, carry protest signs, and celebrate "Black Cat Power." Now, that movement has migrated to MoAD.
At the center of Calling All Cats! is the black cat, a creature followed for centuries by superstition and suspicion. In Reid’s hands, the cat carries dignity, wit, tenderness, and agency. It appears as artist, neighbor, witness, troublemaker and friend. This collection of objects will tell the story of the "Black Cat Revolution," a movement and club Reid founded to dismantle prejudices and raise funds for cats and community members.
This exhibition brings us into the full breadth of Reid’s imagination and introduces one of the Bay Area’s most singular multidisciplinary artists. Her work is joyful, intimate, politically alive and gloriously its own. She explains, "I'm creating my own Black History with cats. The club is for all who love cats, freedom, justice, liberation and stand against superstition."
About the Artist
Dorian Reid (daughter of Betty Reid Soskin) is a Berkeley-born multidisciplinary artist working across ceramics, paintings, prints, textiles, furniture, and protest signs. She is the daughter of historian and public servant Betty Reid Soskin, and her family also owned Reid’s Records, the beloved Berkeley record store. That inheritance runs through her work, where family history becomes folklore, portraiture records kinship, and art enters public life.
What does it mean to carry history with you? Dorian Reid grounds her work in personal history and Black activism. She often uses cats as stand-ins for people, referencing her own family and her aunt and uncle’s involvement with the Black Panthers.
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