My Barbarian
Cat Suit
November 15, 2025–January 17 2026
Reception: Saturday November 15, 6–9pm
Tarot, like art, is a tool for building worlds.
In Cat Suit, My Barbarian presents the first of four suits that will make up the Minor Arcana of their Tarot deck. We climb with them into the symbolic world of the cat and find it a strange and flaming mirror of our own. Here cats thread through the past and future, weaving together history, power, image, magic.
The strange puts on the cloak of the familiar, and the familiar (a witch’s black cat?) becomes a stranger once again. Feline divinities prowl the 1–10 arc of the Minor Arcana: a vaping Cheshire cat magician (the 1 of Cats) leads to the canopic jar of a futuristic pharaoh (4), a lion pride’s kill (5) resolves into the pantheon of animated cat superstars (10). In My Barbarian’s reinterpretations of the traditional royal cards (monarchy has no place in this cosmology), we see the glowing eyes of the Ur-Felid (“Ancestor”) and dive into the forest primeval.
The lifespan of an individual cat is two decades, give or take, but the bond of human+cat has reverberated through at least the last ten thousand years, probably longer. For all these millennia, cats have lived double lives: one the one hand as the fur-and-whisker explorers of wild grass and living rooms, and on the other as a sort of dissipated mist of symbol and memory—that is, as a simultaneous mixture of reality and myth.
This mixture of reality and myth is what gives Tarot—and Cat Suit—its power. To read the Tarot is to meditate and reflect, to consider the great and small, the grand and the intimately personal. Some say you can use the Tarot to tell the future, some say the cards just help us understand ourselves through a process no more supernatural than an emotional mirror. The works in Cat Suit— illustrated cards, video, and sculptural installation—show us a version of the future where the divine and the mundane play together: a reading using these cards might turn dark, hopeful, funny, painful, joyful, liberating, grim. These are complicated, queer, multispecies divinations. They’re a blueprint for myth made real, full of all the ingredients of the soul.
The cards—like myths and like art—pay back with interest the attention we give to them. The cats are waiting to speak with you.
—Nicolas Baird, November 2025.
My Barbarian, founded in 2000 in Los Angeles, is a collaboration among Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade. Their work has been presented in survey exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of America Art (2021), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2022) and the New Museum (2016); they are recipients of awards from Creative Capital, United States Artists and the Foundation for Contemporary Art. My Barbarian’s monograph, edited by the group and curator Adrienne Edwards, is published by Yale University Press and the Whitney Museum of American Art. My Barbarian’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LA; and the UCLA Hammer Museum.
Cat Suit at Lubov is made possible thanks to extraordinary support provided by Peter & Jill Kraus, Clarice O. Tavares, and Noel Kirnon.