Back Where It Began: Coulter Fussell Brings 'Proving Ground' Home to Columbus
- 17 hours ago
- 6 min read
Interview by Carrie Beth Wallace
Images courtesy of The Columbus Museum
Before Coulter Fussell knew what a career in the arts might require, she knew what it felt like to stand in front of a work of art and imagine becoming an artist herself.
She learned that feeling at The Columbus Museum.
Fussell grew up in Columbus, where her father served as a curator at the museum during her childhood. Its permanent collection became part of the landscape of her early life. She remembers running through the galleries, encountering works by artists like Bo Bartlett and Roger Brown, and gradually beginning to understand that making art could become a life.
Decades later, those works still feel familiar.
“When I go home to Columbus and I visit the museum, it's like seeing old friends,” Fussell said.
Returning to the permanent galleries can feel almost like a family reunion. “When I go to the permanent galleries, I'm like, ‘Oh, I remember that piece. I remember that mask.’”
Soon, Fussell will return to those galleries for an entirely different reason. Her own work will be there.
Her upcoming exhibition, Proving Ground, brings several years of artistic exploration to the museum that helped shape her earliest ideas about art. For Fussell, that makes the exhibition deeply personal.
“To have my work in the museum is, of course, like the dream of my five-year-old self,” she said.
Fussell remembers looking at the work around her as a child and reaching what, at the time, seemed like a fairly straightforward conclusion. “That's where I decided that I would be an artist,” she said. “Maybe the museum made me an artist. You visit the museum, and you're like, ‘Oh, well, this is what I'm going to do.’”
Of course, becoming an artist turned out to be far more complicated than her younger self could have understood.
“The path to be an artist is very much not a straightforward path,” Fussell said. “Showing in a museum or anything is certainly not guaranteed. These are things that you learn along the way.”
All of that makes this particular exhibition feel like the completion of a circle.
“It's really the fulfillment of a childhood dream to get to show at The Columbus Museum, back where I first learned what art was."
Columbus has influenced more than Fussell's decision to pursue art. Her childhood here continues to surface in the work itself. “A lot of my work really stems out of my childhood in Columbus,” she said. “That's sort of the starting point of a lot of my narrative pieces.”
Those narratives do not necessarily remain in Columbus, though. They may travel toward Mississippi, where Fussell now lives, or evolve into landscapes that become increasingly abstract. Still, the Chattahoochee Valley remains an important point of origin.
“Really, a lot of the initial narrative starting place in my mind starts with the landscape and scenery of the Chattahoochee Valley.”
That makes Proving Ground a homecoming in more ways than one. Fussell is bringing her work back to the museum that helped make her an artist, while some of the ideas embedded within that work return to the landscape where they began.
The exhibition itself is expansive, encompassing five different series developed across approximately eight years of Fussell's practice.
Proving Ground was originally the title of one specific piece. Curator Kagan Sparks, who initially created the exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art, saw in the title an idea that could speak to the larger body of work: experimentation, testing and the process of trying something in pursuit of what might come next.
That process is fundamental to the way Fussell works.
“I progress or I change directions really fast, but each change of direction is built very much on top of the stuff I did before,” she said. “So that stuff really never gets left behind. It just comes with me as I try something new.”
As visitors move through Proving Ground, they can watch that progression unfold. There is a moment when photography enters Fussell's work. Then photographs begin appearing on fabric. Sewing becomes part of the process. Eventually, photography expands into video and projection.
Rather than hiding the changes in her practice, the exhibition allows viewers to encounter them.
“You can sort of see in the show the exact moments I try something new,” Fussell said. “Every artist is a risk taker, and it's exciting to me that you can see those moments in this show sort of happen as it progresses.”
That willingness to experiment also gives visitors an unusual opportunity. They are not only seeing finished works. They are encountering evidence of an artist repeatedly asking herself what else is possible.
Fussell, however, doesn't believe visitors need to arrive knowing any of that.
In fact, she would prefer that they don't come looking for instructions about what they are supposed to see or feel. “I don't ever ask anything of an audience,” she said. Instead, she wants people to bring their own experiences into the gallery. “I really like the audience member to come with their own stuff. Just come who you are and show up in front of the piece, and maybe there'll be an exchange there.”
That idea of exchange becomes especially interesting when considered alongside the way most of us encounter images today.
Fussell doesn't believe people have stopped engaging with visual culture. The screen has simply become one of the primary places where that engagement occurs. “People engage now. They just engage on the screen,” she said.
But museums offer a much older version of the same human impulse.
“We don't think often about it, but a museum was like the original social media,” Fussell said. “Historically, this is how people got their message out and how they shared their world and what was around them.”
People have always wanted to show one another what they see, communicate their experiences and make sense of the world around them. Long before those ideas were shared through a screen, artists were placing them into objects and images that could communicate across time.
Proving Ground invites visitors to become part of that exchange.
There is also something particularly powerful about Fussell's return to The Columbus Museum for the young people who will encounter her work there. For young girls, especially, Fussell's story offers an example that her own childhood self could not have fully understood.
“One of the great things is that we can be artists now,” she said.
Women were intentionally excluded from many artistic institutions and opportunities for much of art history. Fussell sees today's generation of girls growing up with possibilities that were not available to generations before them.
“Now, not only are we allowed to do it, we're encouraged to do it, and we have the momentum,” she said.
She also sees art as an especially meaningful way for women to claim a voice. “You can have a voice when you're an artist,” Fussell said. “And then you can have a voice that you don't always have to use with your voice.”
For Fussell, abstraction creates room to communicate experiences without necessarily explaining every detail. That can be particularly meaningful for women who want to explore their own lives while also protecting the privacy of their children, families or others whose stories intersect with theirs.
“You can really say something without having to be specific,” she said. “You can say it in some sort of abstract way through visual arts and get it out there, and then sometimes other people can catch on to what you're talking about.”
There is a fitting symmetry in hearing those words from an artist returning to the museum where she first imagined this life for herself.
Years ago, Fussell was one of the children moving through these galleries, looking at the work of artists who showed her something about what was possible.
With Proving Ground, another young visitor can now walk into The Columbus Museum and encounter Fussell's work in much the same way.
Perhaps she will simply enjoy it.
Perhaps she will recognize something of herself in it.
Or perhaps, like the little girl Coulter Fussell once was, she will look around the museum and think: This is what I'm going to do. ◼️
If You Go...
Click on the images below for more information as you plan your visit to The Columbus Museum to see 'Proving Ground.'
