Cat Scratch Tarot

My Barbarian’s tarot exhibition at Lubov evokes the domestic familiarity and ancient unknowability of our feline friends.

By Elizabeth WietMarch 26, 2026

• Art & Architecture

AT THE MOMENT of writing this, I am swaddled in a leopard-print jacket, seeking warmth from the sartorial mimicry of an apex predator who would likely show no kindness to me in the wild. It’s an ironic wardrobe choice, but not a unique one. For millennia, humans have treated cats—whether Panthera or Felis—as avatars. In cats, we find icons of both comfort and classification: we hold them close to our bodies and transform them into memes and emojis, which we use to make sense of our lives.

At Lubov in New York, the artist collective My Barbarian’s exhibition Cat Suit (2025–26) hinged on this double meaning. The title is a pun: not only does it evoke the unitard worn by DC Comics’ feline supervillainess and everyday latex-loving fetishists, but it also recalls a “suit” of cards. In this case, the suit is the minor arcana of a tarot deck. Anchoring the show are 14 inkjet and laser-etched prints on watercolor paper, their 14 × 27 inch dimensions mimicking the proportions of a typical tarot card. At the top of each is a pithy caption (“Youth,” “New Ideal,” “Preservation”) while a number flanks the bottom. The center of each print is populated with a figure, mostly cats, though robots and musclemen make notable guest appearances. Cat Suit is the first installment in what the artists hope will become a complete tarot deck. Rather than swords or cups, they have opted for felines as their motifs for this particular suit because, per the exhibition text, “tarot and cats go hand-in-paw.” As mirrors of our unconscious motivations and desires, both “communicate what we project onto them.”

Much of My Barbarian’s performance work extols the world-building potential of quotidian forms and symbols. So it seems appropriate that their new tarot series should start not with the major arcana’s highly charged harbingers but with the unnamed figures who, as the video Nine of Cats (all works 2025) reminds us, “make up most of the tarot deck” and, therefore, “most of our lives.” Evincing the artists’ commitment to irreverence, each print is accompanied in the checklist by a winking description by My Barbarian member Alexandro Segade, who also designed the prints. The text for the aforementioned muscleman print, Cat Suit 2, begins, “There is a guy at the gym with kitty-cat ears on his headphones. Who does he think he is?” Here he is the object of gentle ribbing. Yet the print itself complicates this story by adding a second figure, a man slouching over the shoulder press and playing with his phone instead of exercising. He is now the one who stokes our ire, while the man in the kitty-cat headphones is confident in posture and in the zone, beckoning identification rather than mockery.

Typically, when we pull a tarot card, we immediately register the suit, number, and name, and then turn to the booklet accompanying our deck to read a short didactic that instructs us how to understand the card’s message in relation to our own lives. Text is the priority—artwork is incidental. But My Barbarian, camp strategists that they are, have inverted this approach. Rather than interpretation, they privilege immersion. The visual world that Segade has constructed across these 14 prints is filled with drama and intrigue, pulling us in like a comic book splash panel sans speech bubbles. (I imagine most viewers do not consult the checklist before walking through.)

Echoing tarot’s association with the supernatural fetish, the prints also elicit the erotic. In Cat Suit 6, a half dozen anthropomorphic cats engage in an orgy, while in Cat Suit 12, two androids drape their metallic limbs over each other in intimate embrace, with a cat perched in between. The androids recline in a high-rise apartment reaching into the stars—a generically futuristic setting—yet the cat that they keep as their company has the same black coat, sleek body, and gold collar as the ancient Egyptian goddess Bastet. Blurring the bounds of time and space, millennia of iconography intermingle throughout the exhibition. In Cat Suit 3, the artists return us to the world of pagan gods and cave carvings, while Cat Suit 13 gives us a comfortably modern and domestic setting: an older woman sits at an upright piano while her cat naps on the rightmost keys. Nods to the queer canon repeatedly pop up, with Cat Suit 9 featuring a trio of feline triplets tilting their bowler hats like Liza Minnelli in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972). Combined with the show’s dizzying temporal shifts, these invocations of performance help transform otherwise static wall works into time-based media.

Projected in a small, curtain-enclosed room off of the main gallery, the video Nine of Cats functions as the exhibition’s hidden lodestar. Like a Greek chorus, a group of performers wearing draped costumes and cat masks cycles through a series of tableaux, each representing a different card in the tarot deck. Their masks engender identification between human and feline. Yet they also create a sort of Brechtian distancing effect, recalling Derrida’s dual association of cats with familiarity and unknowability. They make me think of my own cat, Nora, who always joins me for my most private rituals of self-styling—putting together an outfit, snapping selfies—but whose motivations for doing so remain wholly impenetrable. Each time she jumps up by my side to help me document a new dress, I can’t help but wonder: Why?

I can’t speak to my cat’s impulses, but I can speak to my own: I document my outfits to archive the evolution of my personal style, and to generate inspiration on days when I feel I simply have nothing to wear. This will toward preservation also undergirds the material choices for My Barbarian’s costumes. The silk is pulled from the stash of Barbarian Malik Gaines’s mother, while the watercolor painting on the masks is inspired by third member Jade Gordon’s late stepfather, who was a watercolorist. Future-oriented as individual moments in Cat Suit might be, the exhibition is also firmly anchored in ancestry and inheritance: captioned “Ancestor,” Cat Suit 14, featuring a diminutive red feline that looks to a larger black cat for guidance, captures the comfort to be found in tarot’s tradition, reminding us that the situations its cards predict have already happened to others.

Like the tableaux in Nine of Cats, tarot is an evolving yet constant medium. Its core deck has been unchanged for five centuries, yet the meaning we glean from its content shifts over time. One day, we might pull a card and interpret its message in connection to romance; on another, we might interpret it professionally. I know I’m not alone in turning toward tarot specifically in times of upheaval. Last year, I chose to leave institutional work to focus on my practice as an art writer. In moments when I was uncertain about the path that lay ahead, I picked up my cards for guidance. To quell temporary panic, I also buried my face in my cat’s fur, taking in her softness and scent, returning me to the embodied present.

Cats are a lot like tarot. The precise ways we relate to them have mutated across centuries, but they are always by our sides. My Barbarian acknowledges this multitudinous presence in Cat Suit 10, which brings together 10 different felines from the history of animation, from serial stalwarts, such as Garfield and Sylvester, to older figures like Felix and more recent phenomena like Hello Kitty. The latter is perched on an orb-like figure that could either be an eye or a sun. It calls to mind Shakespeare’s Sonnet 59, with its evocation of the sun’s cycles and the repetitious nature of time.

It also calls to mind the mirror ball above a dance floor. Though each print in Cat Suit suggests a single mirror or screen, they all come together to create a feeling that’s more like a disco. As the ball of mirrors rotates, it constantly refracts light in different ways, changing what we see. A simpler show might have made the cat masks in the video Nine of Cats into Koons-like mirrors. But My Barbarian’s quiet maximalism is not so simple. Instead, Gordon’s watercolor forms meld and merge like the prismatic effects of a cat’s iris gleaming in the afternoon sun—never settling into stasis.

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Featured image: My Barbarian, installation view of Nine of Cats, 2025. Single channel 4K video installation, nine-minute loop. Courtesy the artists and Lubov, New York. Photograph by David McGraw. Image has been cropped.