When New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art came knocking, Qualeasha Wood almost said no. It was mid-2021, and the young Philadelphia-based textile artist and photographer was experiencing one of the biggest waves of attention in her career to date: The [Black] Madonna/Whore Complex, a large tapestry inspired in equal measure by Freud and Kanye, had recently graced the cover of an Art in America issue edited by esteemed young curator Antwaun Sargent. Then the Met got in touch, saying that the surreal mashup of Wood’s own self-portrait with exalted religious imagery and glitched-out web art would be perfect for an upcoming show called Alter Egos | Projected Selves. But Wood felt she could do better. “At first I was like ‘No, you guys can’t have it’, which I think is, like, insane,” she says over Zoom from her Brooklyn studio. “Most people don’t say no to the Met – but at the time, I thought, ‘This piece is good, but it’s not my best piece – there have to be pieces better than that one, right, or else it’s too good too soon!’”
Eventually, Wood reneged – “My mom and my gallerist were like, ‘Just give the Met the piece.’” But her initial refusal speaks a lot to the way Wood moves through the world. Throughout our conversation, the 26-year-old – dressed in a Super Bowl T-shirt and denim jacket, her head recently shaved, looking far more casual than the glamorous, gown-wearing priestess she depicts herself as in her art – describes herself as “bold”, “brash” and “liking a challenge”. She’s still picky about where her art goes, and will decline a sale if she senses a collector just wants her art because they “find it controversial”.
