Three years ago, when visiting her grandmother’s home in Long Branch, New Jersey, for winter break, artist Qualeasha Wood laid down and wrapped herself in one of her grandmother’s blankets. The blanket was covered in a printed photo collage of all of her grandchildren. You know the kind: CVS printed, a bit blurry, “admittedly, ugly.” “I remember thinking there’s got to be a better way to do this,” Qualeasha tells Teen Vogue. It was this small moment of contemplating medium that set into motion her expansive textile practice and rapid rise to New York art world stardom.
In April of 2022, at just 25 years old, Qualeasha became one of the youngest artists to ever have work acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her transgressive works explore voyeurism, queerness, and her experiences with internet culture as a Black woman all through visually arresting woven textiles.
For Qualeasha, now 26, everything is happening at once. Following her Met acquisition, her work has been in demand from institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London, and her name has appeared on any number of annual top-10 lists of artists to watch. As is the historical precedent with works exploring topics of religion, race, and femininity, much of the acclaim Qualeasha has received has brought along with it great criticism. “I had got a lot of pushback with my work being sacrilegious and problematic to some,” she says, … “especially when I was first starting to show my works.”
Around the time of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Qualeasha was doxxed online for the second time. “I was getting all these death threats from conservatives and all of my photos and shows were being spread online. I also got a lot of rape threats. I had people threatening to come assault me,” she says. “I just thought it was so wild that these white men are apparently full of hatred for me but also want to do something with my body. It did make me realize there is this contradiction happening. There are a lot of people who are fetishizing Black women, whether it be publicly or privately, and then when they’re faced with one or any woman in general, there’s just kind of like this immediate dissonance. ‘You can’t be like the women I abuse online, can you?’”
Qualeasha found that this contradiction followed her to the classroom. Early on in her exploration of self-portraiture, a professor of hers brought up his discomfort at seeing her in what he deemed “sexualized” positions and self-imaging. “I think with porn and the Madonna-whore complex in general, men especially don’t want to see the women they know and respect in positions that they deem compromising or sexual or erotic,” she says. “That makes them uncomfortable, because, for them, there’s a place for women they view as replaceable and a place for women they actually like, and those two spaces never overlap.” This contradiction pushed her to continue to include representations of herself within her works almost to the point of centering her practice around self-conception. “I can’t use models because the work is so much about self-actualization and self-realization. Using someone else, the work would lose its meaning.”
Much of her work resides in a space of contemplation over internet culture and the endless ways women, especially Black women, are policed, fetishized, and belittled in online spaces. Discussing her early relationship to the internet, Qualeasha reflects, “When I first started making the tapestry work, I was so chronically online. I think being on the Internet between 2012 and 2019 was not for the weak. I was definitely iconic, but I also think there was just a lot of anger in me.” Understandably, from Tumblr to Facebook, the all-consuming internet culture of the 2010s, with rare exception, was not a particularly welcoming space for anyone understanding themselves as “other.” “I was so mad because I was trying so desperately to fight for a certain type of control over how I was expected to behave or present on the Internet. And I think I had a lot of social anxiety. But being on the Internet so much, I forgot how to honestly behave like a person in real life at a certain point. I think at a certain point, everything that mattered to me was online.”
She overcame this “chronically online” phase and now thinks deeply about how she interacts with social media today. “I learned how to take breaks from the Internet and also kind of see things for what they are, which is just trends and exploitation and hyper consumption,” she says. These themes of consumption, the Black female body as product, and the sometimes toxic over-accessibility of the self to all comes up over and over again in Wood’s tapestries. Even with this realization of the toxicity of the internet, she has found a way to carve out a space for herself online. “Black Twitter is, I feel like, where I spend half my time now. I was definitely not one of those people who enjoyed Twitter up until 2021. I use Twitter as my diary, and I’ve always said that, but I really feel like now more so it’s the safest place I am on the Internet.”
As Qualeasha Wood’s art star continues to rise at a rapid pace, she is settling into her voice and ever expanding textile practice. Next on her agenda is an ongoing show at MoMA PS1 in collaboration with her position as a Studio Museum in Harlem artist-in-residence open through February. As for her ventures on the horizon, she has recently begun a secret writing project that, as far as I can share, involves Artificial Intelligence, lesbian ghosts, and Wood’s signature creative audacity.
