Qualeasha Wood is a Philadelphia-based interdisciplinary artist whose textile practice intertwines traditional techniques and materials with contemporary technologies. Wood started making her tapestries as an undergraduate student in the textiles department at the Rhode Island School of Design. Much of her work and creative ethos speaks to themes surrounding historically marginalized bodies, especially in the modern era of social media and microtrends.

Her tapestries, self-portraits that blur the line between vulnerability and online voyeurism, use each stitch of a jacquard weave to correlate with a pixel of a digitally manipulated photograph or screenshot. In using herself and her own body as her primary subject matter, Wood centralizes herself, a queer Black femme, into a narrative of femininity that has historically excluded bodies and identities like her own.

In Girl Dinner, Wood’s first tapestry to
include embroidery, she questions conventional girlhood and its relationship
with feminine beauty ideals. After studying how digitally altered images of
women can influence physical beauty standards and the ways in which women care
for themselves, Wood uses her work to interrogate what constitutes “natural”
beauty today. With Girl Dinner, Wood
was interested in exploring how women use social media to document their bodies
and the role that cosmetic procedures like surgery and fillers, as well as
personal grooming habits, play in changing the zeitgeist around ideals of
natural beauty. Further, she also became interested in the popularity of
prescription weight-loss drugs and how their use impacts how society describes
body goals and ideals. Ozempic, an injectable medication commonly used for
weight loss, is embroidered in different areas around the tapestry using pink
seed beads. 

Girl Dinner is the first
work by Wood to enter the collection of the Fine Arts Museums. While in dialogue
with the Costume and Textile Arts department’s existing holdings of historic
European tapestries, it expands and broadens the story of textile art-making in
the United States.