The Museum of African Diaspora (MoAD) announces its fall exhibitions featuring Oakland-based artist and muralist Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages, Richmond-based artist Dorian Reid: Calling All Cats!, and a collaborative show that is the first of a two-part exhibition featuring ceramicists of Caribbean descent in After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora.
Dewey Crumpler: ‘Sonic Lineages’
Artist, muralist, and educator Dewey Crumpler is having his first landmark solo museum exhibition at MoAD. The exhibition will debut new kinetic sculptures along with his paintings. Sonic Lineages transmits the artist’s legacy into new multisensory realms, placing his art into dialogue with themes from jazz music. Crumpler began as a city muralist, and through the 1970s and 1980s, he created public murals across San Francisco, many of which still exist today.
The works on view will demonstrate his impact on the history of Black abstraction and his cross-disciplinary exchange with jazz composition. Like meters found in music, Crumpler’s brushstrokes evoke the call-and-response of improvisation. Crumpler taught at his undergraduate alma mater, San Francisco Art Institute, from 1989 until its closure in 2022. During that time, he taught painters who later gained international recognition, including Deborah Roberts, Rozeal, and Kehinde Wiley. This exhibition will also feature Crumpler’s painting series referencing hoodies and container ships, which furthered his investigations of economic and philosophical conceptions of Black existence in the West.
Dorian Reid: ‘Calling All Cats!’
Calling All Cats! will be Reid’s first solo museum exhibition, marking the third presentation of MoAD’s 2026–27 Emerging Artists Program (EAP). Reid is a lifelong East Bay resident whose family’s activism traces back to the Black Panther Party and to her present-day fight for civil rights and animal welfare. She has been an artist with NIAD Art Center since 2003, and also serves on their Artist Advisory Committee. NIAD promotes creative expression, independence, dignity, and community integration by, with, and for people with disabilities.
Reid’s visual world is populated by the characters in her life — family, musicians, activists, neighbors, historical figures, and cats of every color. The exhibition explores the breadth of the artist’s multidisciplinary practice, including ceramics, paintings, prints, textiles, furniture, and protest signs. At the center of the exhibition is the black cat, a figure associated with bad luck and misfortune for centuries. Black Beauty, Reid’s own cat, inspires these pieces and presents the black cat in a new light: as a neighbor or friend. The exhibition’s works weave through Reid’s own story of the “Black Cat Revolution,” a movement and club the artist founded in 2024 to dismantle prejudices and raise funds for cats and community members.
Reid is the daughter of Betty Reid Soskin, a historian and public servant who changed how generations understand California’s past. Reid’s family also owned Reid’s Records, the beloved Berkeley record store. A strong sense of community, conversation, and history runs through all of Reid’s work. Family history becomes folklore, portraiture records kinship, and art becomes one with public life.
‘After the Island’: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora
Black Artist’s Networks in Dialogue (BAND), MoAD, and the Gardiner Museum are pleased to announce the collaborative exhibition After the Island. Two exhibitions will be hosted in San Francisco and Toronto, both exploring how artists of Caribbean descent use ceramics to examine themes of labor, the body, and groundedness from different perspectives. MoAD will feature new and recent work by Sharon Norwood, Jacqueline Bishop, and PJ Anderson.
Norwood inscribes the curly line, her signature mark for the Black body, into vintage china and architectural brickwork, moving between colonial tea services and the hand-formed bricks of Savannah’s enslaved laborers.
Jaqueline Bishop’s newly commissioned ceramic chargers will be on display, including the Banana Man series and Way out of No Way. Both of these center the Jamaican banana worker and the market woman on the very decorative surfaces once used to erase them.
PJ Anderson’s woven vessels and clay figures combine coiled clay with handwoven paper and fiber, drawing on coiling and burnishing traditions she studied directly with ceramic practitioners in South Africa and the American Southwest. Ceramics, usually associated with ornamentation, emerge as vessels carrying traditions forward. The objects are decorative, but they also record a living record of survival, adaptation, and creative continuity. After the Island is a timely reconsideration of how history is carried in its objects, its patterns, and its surfaces that continue to shape cultural memory.
Please find the press kits for MoAD’s Fall exhibitions below:
Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages at the link here
Calling All Cats! by Dorian Reid at the link here
After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora at the link here
