Coulter Fussell Returns Home

The Proving Ground Opens at the Columbus Museum

By Andrew McCrory

When Columbus-born artist Coulter Fussell returns to The Columbus Museum this September, she won’t simply be arriving for an exhibition opening. She’ll be returning to the halls where she first became fascinated by the art world.

Her father once served as a curator at the museum, and Fussell spent much of her childhood wandering its galleries and absorbing the art that would eventually help shape her own. Now, The Proving Ground, her first museum-organized retrospective, brings more than 40 of her quilt-based and mixed-media works back to the place where that story began.

“I grew up in the halls of the museum,” she told me. “The little-girl me would be totally pleased with this.”

As a child, Fussell assumed becoming an artist would be the most natural thing in the world. Of course she would grow up, make art and someday show it in a museum. Only later did she understand how difficult it would be to make that childhood certainty real.

“Then I grew up and realized, as a real grown person, how incredibly hard it is to finally get that to happen,” she said.

Her path to becoming a full-time artist was anything but direct. After earning her BFA at Ole Miss, Fussell spent 20 years waitressing while continuing to make art independently. Living in a small town meant limited access to galleries and exhibition opportunities, and working with textiles—a medium historically undervalued in institutional art spaces—presented another obstacle.

Then the pandemic changed everything.

When her waitressing job disappeared, the decision she had spent years working toward was suddenly made for her.

“One day I just didn’t have a job anymore,” she said. “Well, this is it. Time to do that other thing.”

That other thing was becoming a full-time artist.

Fussell committed herself to it, drawing upon quilting and sewing skills that had been part of her life since childhood. She has worked as a full-time artist since 2020, the same year marking the beginning of the five bodies of work now represented in The Proving Ground.

Her work is difficult to place within a single category. Fussell describes her practice as an intersection of photography, sculpture and quilting, but even that description only begins to capture the complexity of her process.

She builds her work from textiles, photographs and other materials passed along by friends, family members and people within the wider community. She is drawn to fabric that has already been handled, worn and lived with—not pristine material without a past.

“I want fabric that’s already been used,” she said. “I want to appropriate all this stuff from people around me and make this collective object.”

Those contributions bring other people’s histories into the work before Fussell makes her first cut or stitch. The finished piece belongs to her artistic vision, but its materials retain traces of the lives they held before reaching her.

In more recent work, Fussell incorporates crowdsourced photographs and videos, projecting images onto sewn upholstery or printing them on translucent fabrics such as chiffon. Old textiles remain visible beneath ghostly photographic impressions, creating pieces that shift according to where the viewer stands and what each person brings to them.

The exhibition takes its name from one of Fussell’s “War Quilts,” a series exploring conflict, violence and the idea that truth can look different depending on one’s position.

One quilt incorporates lenticular postcards of palm trees that appear and disappear as viewers move past it.

“You have this changing perspective of the landscape,” Fussell said. “The truth of something isn’t just one’s own—it’s a collective.”

Kagan Sparks, curator of the exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art, selected The Proving Ground as its title to reflect the experimental nature of Fussell’s practice. Each series becomes a testing ground where she pushes against the traditional boundaries separating quilting, photography and sculpture.

Although Fussell now lives and works in Water Valley, Mississippi, her understanding of place was formed in Columbus—a city shaped by both the Chattahoochee River and its military community.

“Columbus is a river town and a military town,” she said. “Things come and go; things are temporary.”

That rhythm of arrival and departure surfaces throughout her work. Fabrics change hands. Photographs become separated from the people who made them. Personal objects outlive their original purposes and acquire new meanings. Fussell gathers those fragments of other lives and gives them another place to exist.

Art was not something Fussell discovered outside her home. It surrounded her from childhood. Her mother is a prolific quilter. Her grandmother was a seamstress and dollmaker. Her father was a documentary photographer and museum curator.

Each influence remains visible in her work: the sewing traditions passed through the women in her family, the documentary power of photographs, and the curatorial instinct to gather objects and place them in conversation with one another.

“I was definitely raised around art,” she said. “It permeated my whole childhood.”

Fussell has developed a language entirely her own, but its vocabulary began with her family.

She also does not believe an artist has the final word on what a work means. Once it enters the gallery, every viewer encounters it through a different set of memories, experiences and associations.

“What they think is part of the work,” she said.

In that sense, the art is not complete when Fussell finishes sewing. It continues to take shape in the looking—in the private exchange between the object and the person standing before it. Fussell does not tell viewers what they must see. She creates something layered enough to meet them wherever they are.

For an artist whose work is shaped by memory, family and place, bringing The Proving Ground to Columbus completes a remarkable circle. The little girl who once wandered the halls of The Columbus Museum has returned with an exhibition of her own.