“The audacity of Black women to provide all of the content on the internet but exist beyond the boundaries of your consumption”: Qualeasha Wood’s Black feminist declaration is printed on her jacquard-weave tapestry ill Na Na’s Revenge (2022). Bursts of webcam selfies of the artist holding her iPhone peek out from behind the block of text. The title comes from a 1996 album by hip-hop legend Foxy Brown, Ill Na Na,released a week or so after Wood herself was born. The origins, everydays, and futures of Black femmehood, on and off the internet, are everywhere in Wood’s work. The artist weaves notions of misogynoir, memory, girlhood, consumption, and cyberculture into her tapestries and most recently her tuftings. Both bodies of work are teeming with unapologetic Black feminist rhetoric, queer femme performance, and Black femme millennial style.
It is a step-by-step process. Wood begins with taking selfies. She used to take exceedingly staged photographs with a DSLR camera in front of a makeshift white drop cloth in her apartment; now she poses in front of the computer using her webcam or iPhone. Next, she manipulates the imagery through a collage process akin to brainstorming, drawing on an expansive personal visual archive. She then sends the collage to a textile mill in North Carolina, where a computerized loom makes the jacquard tapestries she calls photoblankets. The genealogy of Black women artists enhancing textile art forms like quilting is important to Wood. She recalls a conversation with the artist Faith Ringgold years ago that motivated her to work on her jacquard-weave tapestries despite the form not being traditionally understood as fine art.
The tapestries address the pain and pleasure of Black femmes and cyberculture. Wood taps into the deep irony of Black women being considered godlike on the internet, producing the best content and being looked to by others as a political and moral compass, while simultaneously being demonized by the culture of misogynoir that plagues the web as it does everyday life. Religious imagery, especially Catholic iconography, is one lens through which Wood represents the sacred covenant and battleground of Black women on the web. In Cult Following (2019), Wood is a Jesus-like figure floating at the center of the tapestry wearing a “sinful” red color. “God is a young hot ebony . . . and she’s on the internet,” is printed in bold white text. This calls for a compelling questioning of religion and its normative representations: “Can God be an everyday Black woman from a small town in New Jersey?” Such insistence upon godliness and spiritual power by other means enacts what Wood calls a “disruption of the white canon” and “cementing a new perspective into reality.”
When no particular radical political imagery is in play, Wood turns to the ongoing exoticization and sexual exploitation of Black women on the internet. The [Black] Madonna/Whore Complex (2021) consists of a montage of Wood’s glitchy selfies accompanied by three pop-up browsers at the bottom, each asking, “Are you ready?”and “Young hot ebony is online.” Wood was raised Christian but is ultimately skeptical of Christianity’s relationship to slavery and colonization; notions of purity and heteronormativity are inextricably racialized through Christian hegemony. That Black women, especially queer Black femmes, are hypersexualized is requisite to the erotics of racism, which theorist Hortense Spillers theorized aptly in the notion of “pornotroping,” denoting white supremacy’s libidinal investment in misogynoir as a regime of terror and representation.2 In enacting what theorist José Esteban Muñoz described as “disidentification,” Wood engages with this hypersexualization and grapples with erotics despite the white voyeurism of the internet.
Wood’s tuftings, which she started making in 2020, portray cartoonlike images of anonymous Black figures in a vague silhouette. Many of the scenes stem directly from Wood’s personal memories of growing up. She imbues them with a sense of innocence, even as the history of Black cartoon figures is fraught with intense anti-blackness and political dispute. “Memory is fickle,” she explains, and for her, the ambiguity of the tufting scenes is in part due to the impossibility of narrating her own childhood in realist forms. The simplicity of the images can become a lens, or mirror, through which viewers can contemplate their own embodiment and memory, “almost like an inkblot test,” she explains. Eyes are a recurring motif in Bump in the Night (2021) and Butterfly Effect (2022), as the notion of watching and being watched is essential to how Wood understands herself as a hypervisible Black woman artist. Of the lack of white figures in her work, Woods notes, “We don’t need to talk about whiteness to talk about whiteness.”
As a Black queer woman who is accountable to herself as well as the intersecting communities of which she is a part, Wood consistently ponders how she wants to see herself represented as well as how other Black, queer, and femme people desire to be represented. Lately she has been reading Afro-pessimist texts, for instance by theorist Calvin Warren, for whom blackness equates to ontological terror, the realm of non-being by violent force.4 She understands this, yet maintains that she does not “want to be a derelict object,” which I recognize as her bold commitment to grappling with the nuances of Black life from a place of terror and trauma—but also cultivating joy and pleasure.
