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.