When the artist was targeted online, it left her too terrified to go out. But she finally got her life back on track – by stitching the whole experience into works of tapestry art
When New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art came knocking, Qualeasha Wood almost said no. It was mid-2021, and the young Philadelphia-based textile artist and photographer was experiencing one of the biggest waves of attention in her career to date: The [Black] Madonna/Whore Complex, a large tapestry inspired in equal measure by Freud and Kanye, had recently graced the cover of an Art in America issue edited by esteemed young curator Antwaun Sargent. Then the Met got in touch, saying that the surreal mashup of Wood’s own self-portrait with exalted religious imagery and glitched-out web art would be perfect for an upcoming show called Alter Egos | Projected Selves. But Wood felt she could do better. “At first I was like ‘No, you guys can’t have it’, which I think is, like, insane,” she says over Zoom from her Brooklyn studio. “Most people don’t say no to the Met – but at the time, I thought, ‘This piece is good, but it’s not my best piece – there have to be pieces better than that one, right, or else it’s too good too soon!’”
Eventually, Wood reneged – “My mom and my gallerist were like, ‘Just give the Met the piece.’” But her initial refusal speaks a lot to the way Wood moves through the world. Throughout our conversation, the 26-year-old – dressed in a Super Bowl T- shirt and denim jacket, her head recently shaved, looking far more casual than the glamorous, gown-wearing priestess she depicts herself as in her art – describes herself as “bold”, “brash” and “liking a challenge”. She’s still picky about where her art goes, and will decline a sale if she senses a collector just wants her art because they “find it controversial”.
“I developed that attitude before I even started selling work, which is a little backwards,” she says. “I was noticing in undergrad that Black artists and artists of colour are expected to package up some kind of trauma, and that makes me feel icky. I was like, ‘If I’m gonna have to be subjected to the system, how do I feel OK with that?’ Now, I think: if I would be ashamed if someone knew, then it’s money I don’t need to take.”
Growing up in Long Branch, New Jersey, a town that “didn’t value art at all”, Wood didn’t even think a career in culture was possible. Going to galleries and museums, she noticed: “If I saw a Black artist, it was more than likely they were dead – and most likely a depiction of a slave in a painting, or art that was stolen from African countries.” When she was accepted to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), she decided she wanted to put herself “in a position to elevate others, or bring more awareness” to working Black artists.
It was at RISD that Wood began making tapestries, inspired by the photo-printed blankets her grandmother had. Before she began at the college, she was already a “social media diva”, running Facebook groups and posting prolifically on Instagram. Once there she took charge of her class’s social media forums and used her platform to “talk a lot of shit”. Sometimes, this was about RISD itself, which at the time, she says, had a low retention rate for Black and disabled students, who made up a minuscule proportion of the student body. Eventually, though, she realised “people feared me a lot” because of her discussion of racism and accountability on social media, and found that her classmates only saw her as an outlet to discuss politics with. Fed up with being seen as a sanctified figure she started placing herself at the centre of her work, first starting a virtual gallery on which she posted photos of herself collaged with images from current events, and later making tapestries in which she was literally sanctified, depicting herself with stigmata and among religious iconography. “I was constantly keeping up with people’s opinions and trying to say the right thing and be a good person – it was monopolising all of my time,” she says. “It had to fold over into my schoolwork somehow.”
Then, in 2017, Wood was doxed. She and her friends had infiltrated a Facebook fanpage for the rightwing commentator Tomi Lahren, changing the group’s photo to one of Michelle Obama. Conservative trolls retaliated by unearthing the personal details of Wood’s family, as well as a series of semi-nude photos she had been accumulating for a forthcoming project. “I was scared shitless – having art taken out of context and put in the world in a very different way, I was kind of like, ‘I see why people don’t put themselves in their work’,” she says. “I didn’t leave my dorm room. Even though Providence is a pseudo- liberal bubble, it’s a very conservative space, and I was terrified. My friends were like, ‘This is so not you to back down or back away.’”
Eventually, Wood came to recognise her doxing as “this weird liberating thing”, despite how traumatic it felt initially. “I had been so worried about semi-nudity being seen by my family and friends, and I was worried about getting yelled at for doing things like that,” she says. “Once [I was doxed], I was like, ‘Now I don’t have to worry about holding back in a lot of ways in my art’.”
Wood’s forthcoming show at London’s Pippy Houldsworth gallery features tapestries in which she utilises screenshots from her doxing for the first time. She was spurred to use them after she read a critique of her work that said her art features “pretend screenshots”; although she generates some of the digital elements of her work, the use of the word stung, like “an erasure of an experience that happens not just to me, but to literally any woman on the internet with an opinion”. After initially living in fear, making tapestries that reframe the experience feels powerful. “For all the people that really hate my work, there are a lot of people who really love it, and think it’s really important,” she says. “I had to think – what’s important to me? To live the life I want to live, the life I advocate for in my work, and to continue to do that boldly.”
