Coulter Fussell
River Raft Quilts Series 1: Jubilee 
Jan 2021 – Feb 2021

Using textiles and associated stories of entrapment/escape donated to their studio, Coulter Fussell hand-sews “River Raft Quilts” with those materials, thereby setting the stories free on a conceptual path to redemption and sovereignty. From a work t-shirt at a tedious job, a pair of sweatpants worn while unemployed during quarantine, a dress from a bad relationship, a kitchen towel used as a napkin, or an old quilt from when their mother’s house was cold…Fussell uses the metaphor of the river-as-escape-passage to lend these stories their deserved exemption.

Curated by Michelle Laxalt & Michelle Lassaline

WATCH: Coulter Fussell + Cicelia Ross-Gotta in Conversation w/ Guest Curators on YouTube

Coulter Fussell was born and raised in Columbus, Georgia, an old textile town. She is the youngest family quilter, hailing from multi-generations of seamstresses and quilters. She produces boundary-pushing quilt-works using old, discarded and donated textiles as her sole materials. Taught to quilt by her mother, Coulter has exhibited works across the country from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to the Piecework Collective in New York City to The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina. As a craftswoman trained only by her mother, Coulter was the Finalist for the 2017 SouthArts Southern Prize, the 2019 Visual Arts Inductee into the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters and a 2019 United States Artists Fellow in Craft.

Coulter lives in Water Valley, Mississippi with her family.

This exhibition is related to a project organized by Michelle Lassaline and Michelle Laxalt as part of the Holland Project’s Curator Series. The series is supported in-part by Nevada Humanities.