Quilt work embarks on a journey of discovery in the art of Coulter Fussell and returns a changed art form with deeper ties, greater resonance and more stories than traditional patterns can hold.
“Coulter Fussell: The Proving Ground,” on view through June 14 at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, assembles five bodies of work produced by the Water Valley artist since 2020 in the first museum survey of her textile art. Works in her Escape Quilts, War Quilts, River Quilts, Pillow Talk and Video-Chiffons share a remarkable range.
The exhibition runs concurrently with “L.V. Hull: Love Is a Sensation,” bolstering the museum’s draw with two one-woman shows focusing on Mississippi artists. They represent different small towns, different generations and different races, but the strong community connections in their art and practices are a parallel thread.
A proving ground is a site of experimentation, to test a new theory or technology. “The Proving Ground” exhibition focuses on Fussell’s continuing artistic evolution, as her works become increasingly sculptural and wrap in upholstery techniques, mixed media, photography and digital projection.
Textiles dropped off by friends and strangers to her storefront studio become the raw materials for Fussell’s works of art.
“Everything, really, that she uses in her works has been given to her. It’s a really beautiful story of community,” said Betsy Bradley, Laurie Hearin McRee Director of the Mississippi Museum of Art. Some materials are inherited or shared by family members.
Fussell’s career is gaining more national attention, Bradley noted. This year, Fussell was the Mississippi artist selected as a Creative Capital inaugural State of the Art Prize Artist; the national program awards one artist in each state for artistic innovation.
Prizes and grants at national, regional and state level, and eight solo exhibitions since 2020 at art institutions around the South have helped Fussell’s development and growing recognition.
This exhibition, Fussell said, “is by far the pinnacle, up to this point.” She credited the Mississippi Museum of Art’s support and encouragement as key in her journey. She singled out her selection for the Jane Crater Hiatt Fellowship (Mississippi Invitational 2021) as particularly instrumental, allowing her to “wait tables less and sew more,” she said.
Quilting’s familiar format, and Fussell’s source material of entirely donated fabrics and more from her community, will likely resonate most with viewers, MMA Associate Curator of Exhibitions Kaegan Sparks said.
“A lot of times, someone in the gallery will recognize a particular scrap of fabric as similar to something that they owned at one time,” Sparks said. “It’s happened to both of us, talking about the show with people. The way that people identify with the different materials that she’s using is something special about this show.”
That material connection can be a fast-track way to identify with the works. “To me, that is a very important part of it,” Sparks said, “but it wouldn’t be what it is, if Coulter didn’t transform that raw material into these really vibrant and … formally complex works.
“She’s really pushing different frameworks,” the curator said, employing strategies of reversal, inversion, layering and more in her compositions.
Works reference terrain both actual and internal, and the materials, often well-used before they are discarded and donated, bring their own history and cultural markers.
War imagery was prevalent during Fussell’s growing up years in a military town — Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia — and crops up often in her pieces, Fussell said, indicating a sweep of artworks in the exhibit’s war quilts series. In “Hawks,” two birds of prey fly at each other in a work that appears to defy gravity.
In “Country Captain,” the 3-D effect (“attic windows” in quilt lingo) calls to mind a shelf where mementos and the memories they hold are stashed. The title refers to a popular dish, often saved for company and special occasions in Columbus, Georgia, that came directly through the military and Fort Benning, Fussell said.
“Country Captain is fried chicken over this sort of rice curry. It was the only dish I ever had growing up that had a curry flavor to it,” she said.
This piece harks to the cross-cultural exchange in the military and textile industries, in its mix of a chenille bedspread manufactured in Dawson, Georgia, and an Indian kantha quilt. It wraps in globalism and war with souvenir pillow scraps, lenticular postcards of ships on the ocean and a heron in an Asian-inspired design from an 1880s houserobe. Crumpled cigarette packs (“Those were found in a front pocket of an old shirt somebody gave in a donation,” she explained with a laugh) fold in with the Army base theme.
Works in her Pillow Talk series play with jokes, dreams, double images and double meanings in a collection of whimsical headboards.
“The other series are my observations about life and environment — what I feel is beautiful or what I feel is interesting about the world around me. This series is what it feels like to be me,” Fussell said.
In one, a pastel knit baby blanket, a bright strip of sky printed on fleece, net from a kids’ backpack, stretch neon lace and a pair of plump lips from a shower curtain are layered like a cake. In another, cat tails curl like scrolls on the upper end of a headboard bookended by feline hindquarters. Its head comes down the center in an arrangement both amusing and surreal.
Fussell slowly began adding photography to her works. When she got to the point of printing on fleece, she then wanted to bend, sew and stuff photos like she does fabric. Cotton and fleece didn’t work for the layering she wanted — ”too static,” she said — but chiffon did. Her ongoing Video-Chiffon series uses the translucent fabric, custom-printed with a repeated photograph or video still.
Her teenage sons’ cellphone videos, capturing the beauty of their Yalobusha County landscape and shared via Snapchat, also caught her eye.
“The nature of Snapchat, those things go away in, like, a day, so I was seeing this abundance of beautiful, discarded photography and video,” she said. “At the same time, I walk into a studio every day of beautiful, discarded fabrics. So, it all became the same material, really.”
Photographs from her dad and her brother, and videos by her sons, are woven into the installation “Hill Country,” where a massive braid arcs into a hill, forming a frame or a stage of sorts. There, videos are back-projected onto a stretched, gingham-printed fabric. From wild roadside blackberries on the braid to pickup truck fun at Sardis Lake on the screen, “Hill Country” combines warm familiarity and fresh innovation for a captivating portrait of home.
Visit msmususem.org for details on admission, hours and related events.
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