2026 State of the Art Prize, Mississippi

About Coulter Fussell

Water Valley, MS

Coulter Fussell (1977, Columbus, GA) is a visual artist who lives and works in Water Valley, Mississippi. Her practice spans quilting, upholstery and sewn mixed media works that intersect photography and sculpture. Working across these forms, she produces dream-like 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 compare global circumstances, both historical and current, with interpersonal psychodramas. Experimentation, 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 Mississippi. During that time, she won numerous awards including the 2017 ArtsSouth Southern Prize Finalist, a 2019 United States Artist Fellowship, the Mississippi Museum of Art’s 2021 Jane-Crater Hiatt Fellowship and 2024 funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation of Visual Arts Exhibition Support Grant. Her work has been featured in various publications including the 2024 art-book New Women’s Work: Reimagining “Feminist” Craft in Contemporary Art and Art In America . Having exhibited in numerous institutions and galleries across the South and New York City, Coulter is currently a full-time studio artist.

Coulter Fussell (1977, Columbus, GA) is a visual artist who lives and works in Water Valley, Mississippi. Her practice spans quilting, upholstery and sewn mixed media works that intersect photography and sculpture. Working across these forms, she produces dream-like 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 compare global circumstances, both historical and current, with interpersonal psychodramas. Experimentation, 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 Mississippi. During that time, she won numerous awards including the 2017 ArtsSouth Southern Prize Finalist, a 2019 United States Artist Fellowship, the Mississippi Museum of Art’s 2021 Jane-Crater Hiatt Fellowship and 2024 funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation of Visual Arts Exhibition Support Grant. Her work has been featured in various publications including the 2024 art-book New Women’s Work: Reimagining “Feminist” Craft in Contemporary Art and Art In America . Having exhibited in numerous institutions and galleries across the South and New York City, Coulter is currently a full-time studio artist.