DORIAN REID    

"Drawing inspiration from diverse interests – including animals and the environment, identity, family history, and civil rights activism, Dorrie Reid’s disarming works reflect a joyful approach to art-making. Endlessly imaginative, her artistic practice becomes a natural extension of memory and personal experience.

Born and raised in the Bay Area, Dorrie Reid was first introduced to art-making early on in school, primarily through drawing. Reid currently attends NIAD Art Center’s studio three days a week, where she has worked across a wide range of media over the past two decades. Recurring themes for Reid are significant seasons and times of year, as well as numerous iterations of the Black Panther slogan “All Power to the People,” realized as text-based prints, drawings, and elaborate quilts.

While Reid will sometimes produce functional vessels, her focus lies largely in playful ceramic depictions of exotic African mammals, wildcats, lop-eared rabbits, kittens, and horses. Incredibly evocative, this standout body of work carries the viewer through a shifting spectrum of wild personalities and emotional impressions: drowsy, startled, forlorn, cheerful, listless, rabid. Often both charming and unsettling, these objects bring to mind Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran’s ceramic monkeys, while also sharing remarkable similarities with Raquel Albarran’s vibrant tableaus. Asymmetrical facial structures and emblematic features remain consistent throughout – bulging eyeballs, undulating lips, flaring nostrils, and lolling tongues.

Working primarily from memory, her chosen subjects serve as initial guides for the art-making process, which seems to favor the exploration of materials and ideas surrounding a particular animal, rather than accurate representation. Occasionally she will use source imagery to mimic the coat markings of wildcats or distinctive horse stars and blazes.” (From Dorrie Reid in Disparate Minds)