FWM adds Qualeasha Wood, Ed Ruscha and David Hartt to the exhibition traveling from Dallas Contemporary
Philadelphia, PA, June 24, 2026—The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) is pleased to announce the only East Coast presentation of You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry, a group exhibition bringing together twenty-five artists. Organized by Mexico-based curator Su Wu and traveling from Dallas Contemporary, the exhibition offers extended engagement with tapestry while reflecting how contemporary artists have magnified and challenged the material, ideological, and narrative conventions of the age-old medium. Presented across FWM’s second and eighth floor galleries, the exhibition opens July 16, 2026 and runs through January 3, 2027.
Taking its title from a letter written by Franz Kafka, in which he imagines his father’s presence woven across a map of the world, You Stretched Diagonally Across It showcases works that test the boundaries between art and craft, perception and tactility, and tradition and improvisation. The exhibition presents contemporary tapestry as an active inflection point for negotiating questions of authenticity, surface, structure, and duration. For many artists in the exhibition, among them Melissa Cody, Goshka Macuga, Analia Saban, Jovencio de la Paz, and Sarah Rosalena, engagement with the technical aspects of tapestry reveals unexpected considerations of perfection and error, deliberation and glitch, in objects where the image is inextricable from the forms that create it.
Other artists such as Consuelo Jiménez Underwood and Kira Dominguez Hultgren incorporate non-textile material, including barbed wire and pine needles, to play with sculptural distortion or coherence of their image. From Berber rugs to works incorporating the loom bar itself, the works in You Stretched Diagonally Across It invite audiences to reconsider tapestry as encompassing dynamic strains of continuity and experimentation.
“We proceeded from the simple questions: what is a tapestry? What does it do?” says Wu. “In this digitally mediated moment, tapestries offer a way of considering material significance, whether it matters what our images are made of, and the relationship between surfaces and the structures that support them.”
In bringing the exhibition to Philadelphia, The Fabric Workshop and Museum has amended the original checklist to add new works not seen in the Dallas presentation. Joining as an Artist-in-Residence this year, Philadelphia-based artist Qualeasha Wood contends with the entanglements of digital self-fashioning and Black femmehood through weaving, tufting, video, and performance. Replete with emojis, cursors, selfies, cropped Renaissance paintings, and avatars from the life simulator game The Sims, her new tapestry commissioned by FWM translates the computer interface into a textile with decorative beadwork. Through endless browser tabs, Wood presents an ambivalent site of escape and capture from the world of representation, especially for Black women. Invited as an exhibiting artist by FWM, Philadelphia-based David Hartt offers a tapestry that inverts a colonial gaze. Evoking the aesthetics of infrared technology or a photographic negative, the work considers empire and environmental precarity through the genre of landscape and science fiction.
Works by artists Ed Ruscha and Mika Tajima from FWM’s collection—both completed during their FWM residencies—explore materiality, perception, and mediation. Ruscha’s monumental tapestry carries the artist’s characteristic graphic language against the backdrop of a dreamy, distorted image, raising questions of clarity and obfuscation. Mika Tajima’s spectrograms that visualize sound waves generated by active Jacquard looms link the processes of weaving and rendering in a self-referential loop.
“As an institution that encourages artists to experiment with and challenge material boundaries, The Fabric Workshop and Museum is proud to bring this dynamic and genre-breaking exhibition to the East Coast,” said Kelly Shindler, FWM’s Executive and Artistic Director. “Su Wu has compiled an impressive roster of artists whose experimental works—many made within the last ten years—interrogate the enduring relationship between material and image to fascinating and surprising ends. We’re excited to deepen connections to our history and location by adding works from our own collection as well as new and recent works by Qualeasha Wood and David Hartt, two Philadelphia artists. All together, visitors will encounter large-scale works that trace tapestry’s ties to storytelling and cultural history, including themes of trade, migration, and myth.”
The exhibition will be accompanied by a robust season of programming designed to deepen visitors’ connections to the craft, including artist talks, a curator talk, master classes led by exhibiting artists, and weaving workshops. With the guidance of FWM staff, visitors will have opportunities to try their hands with weaving using a floor loom installed in the galleries.
Full Artist List
Caroline Achaintre, Yto Barrada, Diedrick Brackens, Melissa Cody, Jovencio de la Paz, Kira Dominguez Hultgren, Josh Faught, Christina Forrer, Sanaa Gateja, David Hartt, Consuelo Jiménez Underwood, Sanam Khatibi, Tomasz Kowalski, Alicja Kowalska, Candice Lin, Goshka Macuga, Christy Matson, Mai-Thu Perret, Sarah Rosalena, Ed Ruscha, Analia Saban, Kiki Smith, Mika Tajima, Qualeasha Wood, and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang.
About the Curator
Su Wu is a writer and independent curator based in Mexico City, examining forms and concepts drawn from the history of art and design to investigate premises of function, capability, and use. Across commissions, collaborations, and curatorial projects, Wu is among the leading advocates in a new generation of curators of post-disciplinary art, interrogating an emerging field of discourse and practice at the intersection of art, craft, design, and architecture, while considering the conditions and strategies that turn one into another.
Wu will return to FWM in October 2026 on a tour to launch her latest book, Mesoamerican Modern (Phaidon Press, 2026).
Media Opportunities
Press Preview
You Stretched Diagonally Across It
Wednesday, July 15, 11:00 am–1:00 pm
Brief remarks and a curator-led walkthrough will begin at 11:00 am.
Available to media-only
The Fabric Workshop and Museum, 1214 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107
Opening Events
Opening Celebration
You Stretched Diagonally Across It
Wednesday, July 15, 2026, 7:00–9:00 PM
Free (suggested $10 donation) | RSVPs encouraged
Celebrate FWM’s latest exhibition examining how contemporary practitioners are transforming and challenging the traditional language of tapestry. Refreshments served.
Drop-in Program
Community Weaving Day
Saturday, July 18, 2026, 1:00–3:00 PM
Included with free admission (suggested donation of $10)
Celebrate the opening weekend of You Stretched Diagonally Across It with an afternoon of hands-on weaving exploration. After viewing the exhibition, learn the fundamentals of tapestry weaving with guidance from FWM’s teaching artists. We’ll experiment with a variety of yarns, colors, and textures while creating a small woven piece to take home. Several weaving stations will be available, including simple tapestry looms and an interactive process lab where visitors can explore the mechanics of weaving and discover how cloth is constructed.
More programming will be announced.
Download the Press Release PDF