On Display: March 7 – April 12, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, March 7, 5 - 9PM in conjunction with First Fridays in Starland
Artist Talk: Saturday, March 8 at 2PM
Closing Reception: Friday, April 4, 5 - 9PM in conjunction with First Fridays in Starland
About the Exhibition
Coulter Fussell’s latest exhibition, Gold Can Stay, presents new upholsteries that capture the poetry, mystery, humor, and danger of contemporary youth in rural landscapes. Using her teenage sons and their friends as muses and collaborators, Fussell transforms everyday moments—late-night parking lot gatherings, afterschool sunlit drives, and midnight roman candle wars—into soft relief sculptures.
By printing Snapchat stills onto translucent chiffons and layering them over vibrant fabrics, she creates immersive textile works that blend nostalgia with the immediacy of digital storytelling. Gold Can Stay marks the first expansion of her crowd-sourced textile practice into the realm of digital photography.
This exhibition follows Pillow Talk at The Atlanta Contemporary (2024) and leads into Hot Water at The Bo Bartlett Center later in 2025. In 2026, Fussell’s work will be celebrated in The Proving Ground at The Mississippi Museum of Art—the first museum survey of her work—supported by a $100K grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation.
Experience this bold new body of work at ARTS Southeast before it all unfolds.
About the Artist
Coulter Fussell (b. 1977, Columbus, Georgia) is a visual artist who lives and maintains her studio in Water Valley, Mississippi. Her practice spans quilting, upholstery and mixed media works that intersect photography and sculpture. Working across these forms, she produces dream-like, playful objects that blur perspectives of love, violence and place in a rural world. Coulter integrates textile materials donated by friends and strangers with crowd-sourced video and photography, creating forms that often compare global conflicts, both historical and current, with interpersonal psychodramas.
Experimental enthusiasm, optimism, humor and the philosophy that Craft is the beginning and end of all Art guides her work. Coulter learned to quilt from her mother and make dolls from her grandmother. The rest she learned from YouTube.
Coulter spent two decades as a full-time, career diner waitress while raising her children in rural north Mississippi. During that time, she won numerous art awards ranging from the 2017 ArtsSouth Southern Prize Finalist to a 2019 United States Artist Fellowship in Craft. In 2021 she received the Jane-Crater Hiatt Fellowship at the Mississippi Museum of Art Biennial and was a finalist for the Museum of Arts and Design Burke Prize in New York City. Coulter has most recently received a 2024 Grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Feminist Visual Art. Having exhibited in numerous institutions and galleries across the South and New York City, Coulter is currently a full-time studio artist.
