Qualeasha Wood code_eden
Qualeasha Wood code_eden
Qualeasha Wood / code_eden
guest curated by Leandra-Juliet Kelley
November 10, 2025 - January 10, 2026
Qualeasha Wood / code_eden explores the vibrant worlds crafted by digital architects — realms that thrive beyond the looking glass and behind the screens of technological devices. Featuring Wood’s textiles, tuftings, and new video works, code_eden transports viewers to the artist’s meta-paradise. The show serves as a companion to Wood’s premier museum exhibition code_anima. Where code_anima examined identity and the process of individuation, code_eden delves into bespoke online habitats. These spaces serve as both places of refuge and modes for self-expression, while the grounds beneath retain roots of temptation inherent to their corporate infrastructure.
Wood’s artistic practice blends human and technological capabilities, revealing the emotive side of life’s “technical gestures.”1 In Deus Ex Machina (What Was I Made For?) (2024), Wood explores ideas of divine intervention and self-determination through imagery of fauna and iconography of virtual and religious sacraments. Wood’s tuftings, such as Into the Blue (2023), visualize the journey of adolescence and introspection through bold colors and pillowy textures. Her digital edens are dynamic spaces where she engages, shapes, and activates her cyber surroundings, what theorist Gilbert Simondon describes as “the relational activity” between a person and their environment.2 The result is a continuous and mutual feedback loop that spurs personal and environmental evolution — “The energy of the technical gesture, having passed through the environment, returns to [the person],” allowing them to modify themselves and “evolve.”3 Qualeasha Wood / code_eden examines the artist as a world-builder. Wood’s multimedia art practice cultivates digital landscapes, demonstrating one’s ability to mold the technical into organic expressions of life.
Qualeasha Wood's Textiles Weave Together Digital Technology, Queer Identity, and Black Culture at Rowan University, Discover Jersey Arts
Qualeasha Wood, WURD The Midday Break Room with Tiffany Bacon
How Growing Up Digitally Shaped this NJ Textile Artist, New Jersey Urban News
World-renowned artist explores the intersection of Black culture and technology in new exhibit, Philadelphia Gay News
Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum to Exhibit Qualeasha Wood’s Tapestries that Draw on Social Media, Queer Culture, and Anti-Black Prejudice, Brenda On Board
Qualeasha Wood unveils code_eden at Rowan Art Gallery, The Whit
1 Gilbert Simondon, "Culture and Technics," Radical Philosophy 189 (January/February 2015): 19.
2 Simondon, “Culture and Technics,” 19.
3 Simondon, “Culture and Technics,” 19.
Artist's Bio
In her textile practice, Wood brings together traditional craft techniques and contemporary technology. 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 marginalization and exploitation of their selfhood and culture. Wood's 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.
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. 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.
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. In 2025 Pippy Houldsworth Gallery presented Malware, Wood’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. She is currently included in Design and Disability, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Virtual Beauty, Somerset House, London; and Voyager 2000: Worldbeing & Wonder, Firstsite, Colchester. Later this year she will be a part of I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies, Autograph, London. In 2024 she presented her first solo institutional exhibition, code_anima, at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Art + Culture, Charlotte, NC, which will travel as code_eden in the autumn of 2025 to Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum, Glassboro, NJ. Other recent solo and group exhibitions include Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN (2025), travelled from The High Museum, Atlanta, GA (2024-5) and The Brooklyn Museum, NY (2024); The Peeler Art Center at DePauw University, IN (2024); Salon 94, New York, NY (2024); Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2024); Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA (2024); Kendra Jayne Patrick, New York, NY (2023); Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2021, 2023); Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA (2022-3); MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2022); and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2022). Her collections include Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Rennie Collection, Vancouver; The Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX.
photo credit: Qualeasha Wood
Guest Curator's Bio
Leandra-Juliet Kelley is an art historian and curator based in Durham, North Carolina. Originally from Dayton, Ohio, Leandra earned a BA in Ethnomusicology from Earlham College where her love of art and music culminated in a documentary on Cincinnati's electronic music scene. In 2014, Leandra earned an MA in Ethnomusicology from King's College London (United Kingdom) with a dissertation that integrated interviews and a photographic series of the local grime music scene.
While abroad, Leandra traveled extensively throughout the UK and Europe, residing in Rome, Italy for a time. Upon returning to the U.S., she lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, working for the Cincinnati Art Museum, Taft Museum of Art, and Contemporary Arts Center, before relocating to Charlotte, North Carolina in 2016. After working at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art for 3 years, Leandra returned to the UK in 2019 to earn a MSc degree in the History of Art (Theory & Display) from the University of Edinburgh (UK). Once back in Charlotte, Leandra worked as the Director of Collections + Curatorial Affairs at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture until 2024. While at the Harvey B. Gantt Center, she curated exhibitions such as Visions: A Study of Form (2023), Kennedi Carter: Sight Unseen (2023), and Qualeasha Wood: code_anima (2024). Leandra currently resides in Durham, North Carolina as she pursues a PhD in Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University.
