QUALEASHA WOOD

While Wood’s tapestries blend images from social media with religious, specifically Catholic, iconography, her ‘tuftings’ represent cartoon-like figures that recall the racist caricatures widespread in popular family programmes of the early-mid-20th century and beyond. In them, Wood adopts a naïve aesthetic that calls on the nostalgia of cartoon animations and their association with racial stereotyping to unpack notions of Black girlhood. Despite their formal simplicity, the tuftings reveal a lurking tension drawn from the artist’s own experiences of consuming media rife with anti-Black prejudice throughout her life. Where the tapestries are absorbed in consumption and cyber culture, the tuftings speak to inherited trauma and necessarily implicate accountability in the viewer.

Qualeasha Wood (b. 1996, Long Branch, NJ) lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. She received her BA in 2019 from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI and her MA in 2021 from Cranbrook Academy of Fine Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. In 2025 she exhibited Malware, her second solo exhibition at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery. She is currently included in Design and Disability, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN, __travelled from the Brooklyn Museum, NY (2024-5) and The High Museum, Atlanta, GA (2024-5). Later this year she will be included in Virtual Beauty, Somerset House, London; I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies, Autograph, London; and Voyager 2000: Worldbeing & Wonder, Firstsite, Colchester. In 2024 she presented her first solo institutional exhibition, code_anima, at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Art + Culture, Charlotte, NC. Other recent exhibitions include The Peeler Art Center at DePauw University, IN (2024); Salon 94, New York, NY (2024); Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2024); Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA __(2024); Kendra Jayne Patrick, New York, NY (2023); Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2021, 2023); Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA (2022-3); MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2022); and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2022). In 2021-2022 Wood was artist in residence at the The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY. Her collections include Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada; The Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX.

Courtesy Pippy Houldsworth Gallery