Mississippi Museum of Art (MMA/the Museum) is presenting Coulter Fussell: The Proving Ground, the first museum survey of quilt-works by Mississippi-based artist Coulter Fussell (b. 1977). Featuring over 40 works from five series created since 2020, the exhibition reveals the evolution of Fussell’s practice from traditional quilting formats to increasingly sculptural, mixed-media works incorporating upholstery techniques, photography, and digital projection. Organized by Kaegan Sparks, MMA Associate Curator of Exhibitions, the exhibition is on view March 21 through June 14, 2026.
Fussell uses quilting techniques to collage together materials donated by friends, family, neighbors, and strangers in her rural town of Water Valley, Mississippi. Primarily textiles, these materials range from bed linens and used clothing to bric-a-brac and discarded objects. Fussell’s newest series integrates these materials with an archive of cellphone video stills and photographs taken by family members, creating works that, as she said, “compare global conflicts, both historical and current, with interpersonal psychodramas.”
Sparks said, “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 and assembled together for the first time, 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.”
The exhibition is the largest presentation to date of the artist’s Video-Chiffons (2024–present), a new body of work that shifts emphasis from collages of recycled materials to the interplay between textiles and image technologies. By integrating photographs, video stills, and digital projection, the Video-Chiffons expand on the role of Southern landscapes—both real and imagined—in Fussell’s earlier works.
Fussell describes her longest-running series to date, the River Raft Quilts (2019– present), as both “guide-maps” and rafts that are “outfitted with suggestions of fish nets to store catch, secret money bags, navigational stars, helicopter landing pads, submarine periscopes, children’s velvet pillows, lures, jigs, and escape tunnels.” The works combine these types of supplies needed for a fantastical journey with lists of sights seen on the banks of an imaginary river—often implicitly the Chattahoochee, which runs through the artist’s hometown of Columbus, GA.
Fussell’s occasional integration of photographs in the River Raft Quilts anticipates the medium’s predominance in her Video-Chiffons series. New additions to this series created for the exhibition integrate moving images for the first time. In these installation-scale works, Fussell achieves new optical effects through projecting video footage on fabrics that reflect, refract, or absorb it.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication co-published by MMA and Inventory Press. It includes essays by Sparks, design historian Nicole Archer, and an interview with the artist by Turry Flucker, Vice President of Collections and Partnerships at the Terra Foundation for American Art.
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, Bernard and Shirley Lapides Foundation, Visit Mississippi, and Visit Jackson.
Coulter Fussell (b. 1977, Columbus, GA) lives and works in Water Valley. 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. 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. 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).
