The Campus: Qualeasha Wood

Opening Weekend | 27 & 28 June 2026

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is delighted to be participating in the 2026 edition of The Campus, a collaborative space founded by New York galleries Bortolami, James Cohan, kaufmann repetto, Anton Kern, Andrew Kreps, and kurimanzutto. For the third annual exhibition, eight UK galleries have been invited to participate: Thomas Dane Gallery, Emalin, Herald Street & Gordin Robichaux, Hollybush Gardens, Lisson Gallery, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, Modern Art, and Vigo Gallery.

For The Campus 2026 Qualeasha Wood presents five new tapestry works that combine digital and analogue processes in her exploration of the intersection between craft tradition and contemporary technology. The desire to be elsewhere drives a body of work that invokes Frantz Fanon's 'zone of nonbeing', identified in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) as an existential space in which Black subjects are stripped of their humanity by prevailing colonial systems. Like Fanon, Wood finds radical potential in such devastation. 

The works at The Campus feature imagery built from life simulation video games such as The Sims and Baldur's Gate, modelled after the artist's home and person. Role-playing games are fantasies of a different life, in which the protagonist occupies two places at once: the body stays in one place, while the self wanders. Wood is interested in how the lines are blurred between the real and imagined, as she virtually evacuates an America that devalues personal freedoms, promotes surveillance, and commodifies Black lives. 

In Wood's practice, her own image acts as a point of departure for works that explore racial, sexual and gender identity as they relate to the Black femme body. As a digital native, Wood deftly navigates an internet environment that is at once a space of celebration and recognition for Black femme figures, as well as a politically loaded site for the ongoing marginalisation and exploitation of their selfhood and culture. Woods’ tapestries combine cybernetic and analogue processes; in her work, a pixel is equivalent to a stitch, each stitch an analogy for the past, present and future of Black femmehood, both on- and off-line, pre- and post-internet.

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. Wood completed a residency at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, in 2021, followed by the presentation of a new body of work at MoMA PS1 in 2022. The same year, The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired her work, making her the youngest artist represented in the museum’s collection.

Since then, her work has been featured in exhibitions at major institutions including The Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2025-6), travelled to V&A Dundee (2026); Cranbrook Art Museum, MI (2026); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2026); Primary, Nottingham (2026); Autograph, London (2025-6); Firstsite, Colchester (2025); Somerset House, London (2025); The Brooklyn Museum, NY (2024), travelled to The High Museum, Atlanta, GA (2024-5) and Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN (2025); The Peeler Art Center at DePauw University, IN (2024); Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2024); and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA (2024). In 2024 she presented her first institutional solo exhibition code_anima at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Art + Culture, Charlotte, NC, traveling to Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum, Glassboro, NJ, in 2025.

Her work is also held in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Rennie Collection, Vancouver; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; Cranbrook Art Museum, MI; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX.