Qualeasha Wood says she approaches life like the arcade game Frogger, jumping impulsively from perch to perch and hoping for the best. Given the vertiginous career she’s traced before the age of 30, that’s hard to believe
The artist’s work—including her signature jacquard tapestries that fuse religious and Internet iconography—has made headlines, appeared across the art-fair circuit, and been acquired by the likes of the Met, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz’s Dean Collection.
Frog or not, it’s a good thing she follows her instincts. As a teenager, Wood opted to forgo the military in favor of art school. Later, she switched majors on the advice of one of her heroes, the late painter Faith Ringgold. Wood met her in the midst of an “identity crisis” during her undergraduate studies at RISD. She admitted to Ringgold that she wasn’t enjoying drawing (she was an illustration major at the time) and wished she’d gone into printmaking. Ringgold “stressed the importance of self-determination,” particularly for Black women, Wood recalls. The next day, Wood received an inscribed copy of Ringgold’s Tar Beach. “Dear Qualeasha,” it read, “you can fly and be a printmaker.”
“I switched my major immediately. I think it was the same day,” Wood remembers. Recently, the artist took another creative leap of faith, departing from her typical medium. For a collaboration with the tech company OpenAI, she fed selfies and other images of herself into a large language model. The process produced what she describes as “a weird cybernetic future version of myself that I named Q2, who embarks on this Matrix-themed journey. It’s all set to Lana Del Rey.”
Intrigued? Then don’t miss Wood’s next project: an installation opening at Philadelphia International Airport in May 2025. While details are still under wraps, she says it will involve a 39-foot-long glass case and “a giant error screen.”
