“Someone walked right across it,” Qualeasha Wood tells me about an exhibition in which she placed one of her tapestries on the gallery floor. “It was a tapestry with my face and my body on it, and so I felt that pain of being stepped on. It felt violent.” After the show, she decided not to place her textiles on the floor in this way again, although she continues to experiment with the way she shows her work. For her, the moment was a lesson in how people view textiles, and by extension, craft. It demonstrated how quickly something can go from being art that is respected, like her other works hung on nearby walls, to something that is not.
Working primarily in Jacquard tapestry and tufting, Wood doesn’t mind her work being called craft or art, but she tells me that in the last few years, she has been increasingly referred to as a textile artist. As a Black American artist who comes from a family working in printing and photography, she draws from a rich personal and political history of Black American craft and art production. However, as much as her practice fits into this lineage, or perhaps because it does, she troubles discrete categorizations. Black American creative production has always been difficult to align with existing Western genres, because its makers were historically excluded from the structures (social, academic, etc.) and communities that created them. This necessitated creating beyond and in spite of these categories.
Wood’s tuftings, bright and cartoonish at first glance, are forms of storytelling. Unlike tapestries, which are woven on a loom, tufting involves a needle, or tufting gun more contemporarily, which draws yarn through a backing fabric to create a series of U-shaped loops on its surface. When Wood saw people, notably men, use tufting to create trendy commercial products— think Supreme-logo rugs—to make money quickly, she thought otherwise: “I wanted to figure out how to have a critical conversation on a rug.” Her tufted works feature a recurring character: a black silhouette of a girl with two Afro puffs and large eyes that peer knowingly at the viewer. This figure approaches and recalls racist Black caricature but stops short of it by not employing any of the exaggerated features that make this imagery offensive.
Her figures’ cuteness allows Wood to draw viewers in and, upon capturing their interest, the sinister element of her images emerges. Wood replaces the cheerful scenarios or light-hearted hijinks traditionally expected in cartoons with scenes suggesting exclusion, danger, and loss. The referencing of racist caricature through its silhouette symbolizes the continued subjugation of Black bodies, but through means that are less blatant. It is also a way of reclaiming and subverting these images to serve those they are meant to denigrate. By placing this character in uncomfortable scenarios, Wood uses it to demonstrate the realities Black people experience. In All You Must Hold On To (2023), the figure holds another like herself, who rests limply in her arms. Where there should be bright white eyes on this second lifeless figure, there is a single blue teardrop.
In contrast, Wood’s tapestries are more hi-fi: internet-age collages rendered in fabric. Text boxes, screenshots, emojis, menu bars, cursors, and the signature red, yellow, and green macOS window buttons are abundant. The result looks like a screen that is glitchy and frozen after opening too many tabs, folders, and images. These tapestries feature images of the artist—mostly selfies taken on a webcam or phone—and chronicle her online experiences, which have included doxxing.
In Clout Chasin’ (2023), she incorporates screenshots from real online exchanges. A text box on the top right of the work shows an exchange between Wood and a user named “James” (his last name pixelated) in the comments of a Facebook post. James writes, “Qualeasha were you born to Crack head parents?” Underneath, Wood matter-of-factly responds, “Nope both military veterans!” The artist has received many comments like these, many of them much worse than what she has chosen to depict. “I didn't want to put the worst things in [my tapestries] because I just didn’t really feel like I needed to use the most graphic thing in the world for people to grasp how fucked up it is that the average person will just have interactions like these casually with zero consequence.”
By fixing the ephemeral and fast-paced nature of the internet in fabric, Wood slows and solidifies the experience of being a Black femme online for contemplation. Instead of being able to ctrl+alt+delete away, we are forced to look. More than that, part of her decision to work in Jacquard weaving and tufting relates to specific moments and places from her home life, such as her grandmother’s house, where a blanket depicted photographic images of her grandchildren. Wood’s tuftings were inspired by a Looney Tunes rug in her childhood room. Using these materials to articulate and grapple with her experiences shows how those encounters continue to linger in the reality we inhabit after clicking away and powering off, as well as how deeply felt memories are—they can be held, they have a texture. When I ask Wood about her decision to transfer the images she makes onto textiles as opposed to paper, she explains that “how something feels is sometimes more important than what it looks like.” In her tapestries, which could be dismounted from the gallery walls and wrapped around the viewer, Wood withdraws the possibility of comfort and leaves the viewer cold and bare in front of her reality. Here, both recalling and subverting the usual function of blankets expands the work’s conceptual purpose.
Stereotypes about craft have associated it with the domestic space and handmade objects. Although Wood does not shy away from these ideas of craft, she destabilizes assumptions about them. She shows her work in galleries, hanging them as one would paintings. With her tapestries, she has removed herself from a large part of the physical production. She creates digital images, then sends them to an industrial weaver in South Carolina where they are uploaded to a computer. The data is then sent to a machine that autonomously weaves the physical work. The results are, unsurprisingly, technically perfect. Every thread is held impeccably in place, nothing too taut or too loose. Walking up to the works in person feels like being let in on a magician’s secret. The weave looks so perfect that it plays with the potentially lowered expectations of technical precision toward craft forms. Wood’s practice also calls into question how the hand of the maker is valued. While handicraft has not often been elevated in Western categories of art, evidence of the maker’s hands in other media like painting and sculpture has been seen to transcend human imperfection and idiosyncrasy to become literal “strokes of genius.”
Despite their unblemished technical appearance, there are imperfections in Wood’s tapestries. These imperfections come from errors that Wood leaves in the digital files, which then show up on the weavings— pixels misplaced, images interrupted. In this way, and by adding beaded embellishment to the tapestries after receiving them, she shows her hand. Craft objects are often designated as such through the materials and processes, whether by hand or machine, involved in their creation.1 Wood’s beading feels more connected to craft while her industrially woven tapestries feel akin to fabrication methods used by artists like Damien Hirst or Ai Weiwei. This industrial production encroaches on another line, between art and commercial product. By using a process typically meant to mass-produce, Wood upsets the notion of singularity or limited production as a marker of value through the object’s ability to be replicated. Wood’s fabrication methods that span art, craft, and product remind viewers that minor differences in context can tip an object from one category into another. Sometimes these differences are so indistinguishable that the validity and utility of these categories feels flimsy.
In the gallery space, categorizations are also negotiated. Bringing objects into the gallery certainly changes the expectations placed on them. “I never created my work for the places it exists in now,” Wood says. She used to hang her work by nailing it to the wall. “It only created small holes,” which did not bother her, but would be deemed damages in a commercial gallery, where significant efforts are made to preserve a sense of art’s preciousness. Now when Wood shows in galleries, invisible fastening mechanisms must be created so that her pieces lie flush, like paintings, against the wall. She also tells me that she and other textile artists have been asked to change the materials they use, materials they enjoy working with, so that they are more appealing to buyers and can be better preserved: “These are the things your work has to lose to enter these spaces.” Wood feels that the increased interest in textile work mirrors the rise of interest in Black artists around the time of George Floyd’s death and the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. By working in service of the market, and attempting to demonstrate their diversity, galleries and museums show these works without a deeper concern either for the works’ materiality or the communities in which they are embedded. Wood thinks this is a troubling trajectory: “My concern for textiles right now is that we’re goingto start losing a connection with the medium, and it’s going to be more about the content than the technical skill.”
In the wider lineage of Black American textile work, technical skills, such as quiltmaking, provided a range of functions from self-expression to community building, and for those who were enslaved, it could facilitate emancipation as well. When Africans were forcibly taken from their homelands and brought to the Americas as slaves, their outlets for expression were greatly limited. For Black women in the United States, quiltmaking became a means of marking out space for expression on their own terms. They took pieces of the cotton they picked, spun and sewed them for slave owners, and used the materials to make quilts in their quarters after the day’s work was done. For example, ex-slave Fannie May Moore describes her mother “work[ing] in the field all day and piec[ing] and quilt[ing] all night.”2 This making was communal and ultimately passed down generationally—seen, for instance, in the experimental minimalist designs of the Gee’s Bend quilters who had been quilting in the Alabama hamlet since the 19th century. In rarer cases, slave women’s technical skills allowed them to purchase their own manumission.3 More famously, the quilts along sections of the Underground Railroad hung on the laundry lines and banisters of “safe houses” and used a range of symbols to guide escaped slaves from the US north to Canada. These quilts signalled paths toward safety.4
Despite these women’s mastery of textiles, their works have been historically overlooked based on Western designations that denigrate women’s work and craft. The latter term and its associations removed textile works from critical conversations involving other two-dimensional arts like painting and drawing.5 Additionally, the identities of the makers—slaves, women, Black— all worked to exclude them artistically as much as they did socially, politically, and economically. Despite this, the primary goal of these makers was not to win the appreciation or acknowledgement of larger Western and white audiences. These quilts were threads linking them to cultures lost in the middle passage. Take, for example, Guinea-born slave Louiza Francis Combs’s woven wool blanket (c. 1890) that, with its asymmetrical horizontal lines, draws on Mandé spirituality. The Mandé believed that evil spirits could only travel along straight lines, and so this object serves multiple purposes—beautification, warmth, and spiritual protection.6 Indeed, many of the cultures on Africa’s west coast from which slaves were taken shared the view that art and life were intrinsically intertwined. For them, an object’s utility did not demote it to a lesser category. According to Malian historian and ethnologist Amadou Hampâté Bâ, “[S]ince all objects and actions were endowed with special meanings, every gesture or movement was considered art—nothing was considered to be utilitarian, domestic, or recreational alone.”7
Perhaps today, a question of function still exists in delineations of craft and art. In craft critic Rose Slivka’s influential 1961 essay “The New Ceramic Presence,” she writes, “At the point that all links with the idea of function have been severed, it leaves the field of the crafts.”8 However, since the ’60s, global art practices that serve express functions have widely emerged, from creating social gathering spaces to providing public education. Additionally, the craft-oriented practices of artists like Adebunmi Gbadebo present more contemplative paths. In works such as In Memory of Carrie Dash, 1903–1930, Here I Lay My Burden Down, B.A.S. (2023), Gbadebo creates pots using clay from the land her enslaved ancestors worked in South Carolina, where their very materiality holds historical and emotional significance away from Slivka’s ideas of function. As Wood notes about the increased appearance of textiles in art spaces, what seems to happen is that fine art expands to accommodate elements previously considered craft. This process often asks “craft-now-art” to ignore its practical origins and relationship to the materiality of life. As this reframing takes place, the question of who it serves becomes more relevant. Moreover, protecting what is at stake in craft—alternative relationships with objects made through creative expression—becomes increasingly urgent.
As Black American textile practices like Wood’s and others demonstrate, there is much room for negotiation in the boundaries of craft and art. Dawn Williams Boyd uses the collage-like aesthetic of quiltmaking to depict stirring narrative imagery, while Bisa Butler’s vibrant works are created through a technique that many note makes them nearly indistinguishable from painting. Faith Ringgold, whom Wood met while she was studying at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), is another important example—her “story quilts” were born out of necessity. Practically, she chose the medium because she wanted to create work light enough to carry on her own without her husband’s help. Her content came from the desire to tell stories about Black people on her own terms. Working in quilts, with their historical significance to Black Americans, was a way of nodding to overlooked Black history. Ringgold elevated this history by painting scenes on to the panels of her quilts. When I ask Wood, who also experimented with quilting while at RISD, if she sees herself as part of this lineage of Black textile artists, she says that she does. Then she reminds me that Black history is cyclical. I suppose it’s like a needle pulling thread, circling as it binds histories, categories, and people.
