Coulter Fussell: The Proving Ground is the first museum survey of “quilt-works” by Mississippi-based artist Coulter Fussell (b. 1977). Presenting over forty sewn collages created over the past five years, the exhibition reveals the trajectory of Fussell’s practice from traditional quilting formats to increasingly sculptural, mixed-media works that incorporate upholstery techniques, photography, and digital projection.
Working out of a storefront studio in rural Water Valley, Mississippi, Fussell collects discarded textiles and other items from friends, family, neighbors, and strangers. This miscellany forms the main source material for works that range from altered quilts to wall-hung soft sculptures featuring photographs and video stills printed on translucent chiffon. Fussell uses the collage techniques of quilting to create layered landscapes of the American South, often referencing specific terrains like Mississippi’s Wildcat Brake, the salt marshes of the South Carolina Lowcountry, Louisiana’s Poverty Point, and the Chattahoochee River that runs through her hometown of Columbus, Georgia.
A proving ground is a site of experimentation where a new theory or technology may be tested. Across five bodies of work produced since 2020, Fussell relays the complexities and contradictions of place, indeed testing what we think we know about the physical and figurative landscapes that situate our lives and memories. From the flat, negative space of decorative patterns to photographic plays on perspective, her art explores the perceptual, geographic, and cultural “grounds” that frame our experience and shape what we believe.
Coulter Fussell: The Proving Ground, a presentation in the Myra Green and Lynn Green Root Memorial Exhibition Series, is presented with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Meyer and Genevieve Falk Endowment Fund for Culture and Arts of the Community Foundation for Mississippi, Bernard and Shirley Lapides Foundation, Visit Mississippi, Visit Jackson, Panola Pictures, Becky and John Tatum, Roderick Kiracofe, and Blair Hobbs and John T. Edge.
About the Artist
Coulter Fussell (b. 1977, Columbus, GA) lives and works in Water Valley, Mississippi. After completing a BFA in painting at the University of Mississippi in 2000, she worked as a diner waitress for nearly two decades, occasionally making quilts on commission and writing a weekly newspaper column as an amateur local historian. From 2010 to 2014, Fussell collaborated with artist Megan Patton to open Yalo Studio, a community space for exhibitions and artist residencies situated on Water Valley’s Main Street. In 2014, Coulter opened Yalo Textiles two doors down, where she collected donated materials and taught textile workshops. Today, she uses the studio for her own full-time art practice, making mixed media works at the intersection of quilting, upholstery, photography, and sculpture.
Fussell’s work has been recognized by prizes and grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Feminist Visual Art (2024), South Arts (2024, 2017), the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters (2023, 2019), the Museum of Arts & Design (2021), Art Fields (2021), the Mississippi Museum of Art (2021), and United States Artists (2019), among others. In 2026, she was selected to represent Mississippi for Creative Capital’s Inaugural State of the Art Prize. Since 2020, her work has been the subject of eight solo exhibitions at art institutions across the South, including the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (Charleston, SC), Alabama Contemporary Art Center (Mobile, AL), Institute 193 (Lexington, KY), Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), and the Bo Bartlett Center (Columbus, GA).
