Qualeasha Wood

Qualeasha Wood (b. 1996) is a Philadelphia-based artist whose self portraits on beaded jacquard weavings mine digital spaces as they relate to the Black queer and femme body both online and in the real world. Reacting quickly to the disposability of meme culture and rapidly updating current events, Wood embraces the aesthetics of social media and Catholic iconography in her distillations of online chatter to highlight the stubborn and underlying threads of misogynoir—or the ways in which anti-Black racism and sexism intersect simultaneously—which drive much of cultural discourse. As The Metropolitan Museum of Art writes, “By presenting herself as both a holy icon and object of desire, Wood rejects the racist, sexist stereotype that views Black women solely as promiscuous commodities; she accomplishes this move by enshrining and controlling her own image.”

Wood’s work was recently the subject of a solo exhibition, code_anima, at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Art + Culture, Charlotte (NC) in 2024. Recent group exhibitions include Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swiss Beatz and Alicia Keys, Brooklyn Museum (NY) in 2024, which traveled to The High Museum, Atlanta (GA); Threaded Visions: Contemporary Weavings from the Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago (IL) in 2024; It’s Time for Me To Go: Studio Museum Artists-in-Residence 2021-22, MoMA PS1, Long Island City (NY) in 2022; and Alter Egos | Projected Selves, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (NY) in 2021, among others.

The artist’s work is collected by numerous public institutions, including The Art Institute of Chicago (IL); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (NY); The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX); The Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence (RI); and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (NY), among others.