Threads of Time & Place

Through quilts, landscapes and experimental projections, artist Coulter Fussell explores memory, material and Mississippi life in her sweeping new exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art.

Written by Lena Anderson | Photos by joe worthem

Water Valley artist Coulter Fussell is the subject of a major new exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art this spring, bringing her distinctive textile-based work to a statewide audience.

Titled “Coulter Fussell: The Proving Ground,” the exhibition in Jackson marks Fussell’s first major museum survey.

Featuring roughly 40 works created between 2020 and 2025, the show explores how the north Mississippi artist blends traditional quilt-making with experimental forms, from sewn landscapes to digital projection.

At the center of Fussell’s practice is quilting — though it wasn’t always the direction she expected to take.

“My mom is a quilter,” she said. “But when I was a little girl, I was completely uninterested in sewing.”

Growing up in the 1980s, Fussell remembers wanting to ride bikes with her brothers and draw cartoons rather than sit at a sewing machine. She says she always knew she wanted to be an artist — but at the time, that meant painting and drawing.

It wasn’t until her early 20s, during a visit home from college, that she asked her mother to teach her how to make a quilt. The first attempt was chaotic.

“I pieced this quilt in my own style, in this crazy way,” she said. “And it didn’t work as a quilt.”

Her mother’s advice was simple: learn the rules first. Only then could Fussell break them.

That duality — traditional craftsmanship paired with artistic experimentation — has shaped her work ever since. Rather than following a linear path from traditional quilting into abstraction, Fussell said she developed both simultaneously.

“From the very beginning, I had this mix between reaching into other art forms and trying new things but using the traditional techniques and tools of quilt making to hold it all together.”

Today, her studio practice still centers on fabric, much of it donated by friends, neighbors and strangers. The materials often arrive in bags, sometimes with notes explaining their origin, sometimes with nothing more than her name scribbled across the top.

Occasionally, a scrap comes with a story: a great aunt’s sewing project, a long-kept heirloom.

But many pieces arrive without context, leaving Fussell to imagine their past lives.

“I treat it like a new piece,” she said. “But I know there's all this history coming in with it.”

That layered sense of memory and materiality plays a central role in “The Proving Ground.” Alongside her signature quilts, the exhibition introduces new work that expands beyond textile traditions.

In recent years, Fussell has begun crowdsourcing photographs and short videos, many taken by local teenagers, including her own sons. The fleeting images, often posted temporarily on social media, reminded her of the discarded fabrics that fill her studio.

“They would take these beautiful landscapes and put them on Snapchat for 24 hours, and then they were gone,” she said. “It felt the same as the fabrics people were throwing away.”

Using these images as source material, Fussell creates sewn landscapes inspired by Mississippi’s horizons — skies, trees and open fields rendered through layered textiles and projected video.

The projection elements represent some of the most experimental work in the exhibition. Fussell laughs about the technical challenges involved in learning new equipment and managing cables in her studio. Still, the process mirrors the way she once approached sewing: slowly, through repetition and trial.

“It’s hard because that’s not my natural language,” she said. “But I’m figuring it out.”

Looking back at the five years of work assembled for the show, Fussell said the biggest surprise was how much her technical skill has grown.

“I became a better tailor,” she said. “Anyone who sews every day for five years is going to get better.”

But the deeper transformation lies in confidence, trusting both the structure of the craft and the freedom to regularly push beyond it.

Fussell has lived in Water Valley since 2003, and her work is deeply rooted in the culture and landscape of north Mississippi. In addition to her studio practice, she writes the popular

“Wagner Week” column for the North Mississippi Herald, based on a collection of historic letters she discovered at a local estate sale more than two decades ago.

That fascination with storytelling and documentation runs parallel to her visual work, influenced in part by her father, a folklorist.

“I think I have this tendency to archive or document things,” she said.

Living and working in Water Valley continues to shape Fussell’s approach. She believes contemporary stories about rural places should be told by artists who are actively part of those communities.

“There are artists here making work about Mississippi right now,” Fussell said. “You don’t have to move to New York. We need artists living in these rural places in real time, making work about what’s happening here today.”

Plan Your Visit

“Coulter Fussell: The Proving Ground”

March 21-June 14, 2026

Mississippi Museum of Art, 380 S. Lamar St., Jackson

Museum hours: Tuesdays-Saturdays: 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sundays: 1-5 p.m.