Open Air: Artist Talk with Qualeasha Wood

Open Air is a monthly series of virtual studio visits and intimate conversations with Black artists across the globe hosted by the Gantt. May's iteration of Open Air features textile artist Qualeasha Wood. Wood navigates both an internet environment saturated in Black femme figures and culture, and a political and economic environment holding that embodiment at the margins.

This program will be livestreamed on our YouTube channel.

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 programs of the early-mid-20th century and beyond. As well as marking a technical shift from the artist’s tapestry pieces, the tuftings have a distinctly different visual style. 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.

Dexter Wimberly is an American curator based in Japan who has organized exhibitions in galleries and institutions around the world including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, The Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, KOKI Arts in Tokyo, Bode Projects in Berlin, and The Third Line in Dubai. His exhibitions have been reviewed and featured in publications including The New York Times and Artforum; and have received support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and The Kinkade Family Foundation. Wimberly is a Senior Critic at New York Academy of Art, and the founder and director of the Hayama Artist Residency in Japan. He is also the co-founder and CEO of the online education platform, CreativeStudy.