Textile artist and New Jersey’s own Qualesha Wood will make her home-state debut with her solo show, code eden, from Nov. 10 to Jan. 10 at the Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum.
Now based in Philadelphia, Wood describes herself as someone shaped by the digital world. She said she’s drawn to the overlapping realities of life online and offline: the physical spaces we occupy and the digital ones we enter through our screens.
“There’s the physical space that you’re in, but there’s also the other space that is there on your computer in the background. When we’re on our phones talking to other people, we’re entering new spaces and environments,” said Wood.
For Wood, many of those spaces were online role-playing games or life simulators like The Sims, where you enter a fantasy or another version of yourself and are tasked with doing things that you would do in the real world, mimicking life.
“Playing The Sims at seven years old was how I learned about concepts like free will or came to understand things like ontology and what it meant to be alive,” she said.
Her work often reflects on her identity as a queer Black woman and how race, social media, and digital culture shape self-perception. She says her understanding of race began through her parents’ experiences growing up in the segregated North and South of the 1960s.
“Either way, those experiences of being black in a time when segregation was still real and happening, there’s a socialization that happens. Society teaches you how to behave,” she said.
code eden can be seen as a companion to Wood’s previous show, code anima, which was exhibited at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts and Culture in Charlotte, NC, in 2024. The show will feature layered worlds and self-portraits through textiles, tuftings, and new video works all built by Wood digitally, turning the language of technology into landscapes.
Like code anima, there is much world-building in her work, blurring the line between the virtual and the human. code anima was about the artist and the inner self, the workings of identity and how we unpack and understand it. code eden takes that further by thinking about how we’re shaped by our environments, how we contend and negotiate with space, and how we choose to be visible or invisible.
Wood says that living online has expanded how people explore creativity, identity, and community. For her, digital spaces offered the freedom to define herself beyond traditional constraints as a Black queer woman—though she notes that such immersion can also breed dependency.
“We’re so fully immersed in these spaces, and the pros are that we learn so much more in our capacity for understanding play, creativity, wonder, and identity,” she says. “In a digital world, I was able to be so many things I couldn’t be in the real world. The cons that come with that are when we’re swept up into a space like that, there’s a dependency and unwillingness to leave.”
Wood’s journey to becoming an artist wasn’t an obvious one. Originally an illustrator, Wood met NJ textile artist Faith Reingold. When she expressed her unhappiness in drawing and wanted to move on to print making and work for herself, Reingold gave her encouragement.
“She told me ‘you have to go for it,’” said Wood. “We had a really good heart to heart for about 25 minutes. Women, especially Black women, weren’t always in a position to choose what we wanted to do. She really pushed me to get out of my comfort zone.
After studying printmaking and lithography, Wood became interested in textiles after noticing her grandmother’s woven tapestry blanket one late night. She recalls realizing for the first time that the images weren’t printed but stitched, a discovery that sparked her fascination with the medium.
“It was the first time I ever really looked at it because in the past it was something I overlooked,” she said. “Having it there in my hands, and being able to move it and play with the images, I realized it wasn’t printed but stitched this way. I became obsessed with the process after that.”
An opening reception will take place on Nov. 15, from 3 to 5 p.m. and will feature a discussion with Wood and guest curator Leandra-Juliet Kelley, an art historian and curator based in Durham, NC.
The Rowan University Art Gallery and Museum, 301 High St. W, Glassboro is open to the public with free admission Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.