Coulter Fussell (b. 1977, Columbus, Georgia) received a BFA in Painting from the University of Mississippi, and hails from a long line of seamstresses and quiltmakers who the artist cites for her love of textiles. Her practice spans quilting, upholstery and mixed media works that intersect photography and sculpture. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States including The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (Charleston, South Carolina), The Wiregrass Museum of Art, (Dothan, AL), and the Alabama Contemporary Art Center (Mobile, AL). Fussell’s work is also in the permanent collections of Columbus Museum of Art (Georgia) and the Mississippi Museum of Art (Jackson, MS). In 2023, Fussell was a Mississippi Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship recipient and inducted into the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. She recently received a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to support new work and a book for a large-scale solo exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art in 2026.
Artist Statement
I use quilting traditions passed down from my mother and grandmother to create dream-like objects that blur perspectives of love, violence and place in a rural world. Using exclusively found and donated materials, I piece together disparate elements and the histories they carry to explore historic and current global conflicts, personal experiences, and Southern storytelling traditions. I employ a painterly lens in piecing together different fabrics and other elements that allows her to move beyond the restraints of the patterns and structures of my materials, and lends a strangeness and warmth to the work.
