Following her residency with the insitution, Qualeasha Wood is included in You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA.
At once a celebration of the genre and a categorical collapse, the exhibition offers extended engagement with the age-old textile medium while magnifying how contemporary practitioners are challenging its material, ideological, and narrative conventions.
In a new large-scale tapestry, produced in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Wood extends Frantz Fanon’s concept of the zone of nonbeing, in which Black people are denied subjectivity and the status of human. Replete with emojis, cursors, selfies, cropped Renaissance paintings, and avatars from the life simulator game The Sims, anywhere! (but here.) (2026) translates the computer interface into a textile with decorative hand-beadwork, rhinestones, and embroidery. Installed atop wallpaper recalling Photoshop’s transparency grid, the textile floats in cyberspace, evoking the artist’s process and the possibility of transformation.
Exhibiting artists: Caroline Achaintre, Yto Barrada, Diedrick Brackens, Melissa Cody, Jovencio de la Paz, Kira Dominguez Hultgren, Josh Faught, Christina Forrer, Sanaa Gateja, David Hartt, Consuelo Jiménez Underwood, Sanam Khatibi, Tomasz Kowalski, Alicja Kowalska, Candice Lin, Goshka Macuga, Christy Matson, Mai-Thu Perret, Sarah Rosalena, Ed Ruscha, Analia Saban, Kiki Smith, Mika Tajima, Qualeasha Wood, and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang.
14 July 2026
