In celebration of Women’s History Month, a selection of contemporary women artists reflect on their art and share what inspires them most in the Museum.
Women’s work. Once used as a demeaning term for household labor, when applied to art-making, it expands considerations of why we express ourselves and recognizes the tremendous contributions women have consistently made to art history across time.
As part of The Met’s celebration of Women’s History Month, we asked a selection of contemporary women artists with work in the collection to reflect on their art and to share what inspires them most in the Museum. In this first installment of our two-part series of discussions, Qualeasha Wood speaks to the navigation of interior and exterior spaces in her tapestry, The [Black] Madonna/Whore Complex (2021). Amy Sillman discusses the time she commits to finding form for works like Finger x 2 (2015). And Pat Steir shares the excitement of discovery that resulted in Sixteen Waterfalls of Dreams, Memories, and Sentiment (1990) and the thirty-three years of art-making that followed.
Qualeasha Wood
Qualeasha Wood (American, 1996). The [Black] Madonna/Whore Complex, 2021. Jacquard-woven cotton, glass beads, 71 × 54 × 1/2 in. (180 × 137 × 1 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Funds from various donors, in memory of Randie Malinsky, 2022 (2022.51) © Qualeasha Wood, courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kendra Jayne Patrick, New York
Is there anything you would like readers to know about The [Black] Madonna/Whore Complex?
There’s something really fun about the tapestries that feels like unwrapping a gift. Each time you look, you recognize something new. I enjoy watching people point at and dissect different things going on in the piece and pulling out what they recognize. There is an overlapping of space, a barrier being broken, that happens a lot as the work navigates interior and exterior spaces. On the one hand we’re dealing with the digital, which implies the future, but we’re also dealing with the present moment and the past through the physical moments being depicted. There are parts of my old home in there, the bed I used to have, even plants that are no longer living. This blurring of worlds is one of my favorite things about the piece.
“The studio for me exists in the bedroom, at home, as much as it exists in the professionally zoned places we might pay to create in, too.”
– Qualeasha Wood
There’s an assumption that I do a lot of the work in a professional studio environment, but the studio for me exists in the bedroom, at home, as much as it exists in the professionally zoned places we might pay to create in, too. I invite people to look and to look closely for what is there on the surface but also to consider what is lost or hidden. There are over one hundred layers that went into the creation of this piece, in its digital version, but what we’re left with is what comes together.
Are there works at The Met you regularly turn to when you visit?
I always look for certain artists or things at the beginning of my journey in any museum, and I visit the prints and textiles most often. Elizabeth Catlett is someone I look for everywhere, and Lovey Twice (1976) is a piece I’ve returned to visit quite a few times. It challenges what it means to be looking and seeing, which is something important in my work right now. As someone who started falling in love with art through lithography, it’s a reminder of my journey.
