Inhabiting Place: Work by Anna Evans, Coulter Fussell, & Julia Gabriel Weber Exhibition

Opening Reception: Oct 24 | 1:00 – 4:00pm

Artists’ Talks & Panel Discussion: Oct 24 | 2:00pm

This year’s Symposium welcomes artists Anna Evans, Coulter Fussell, and Julia Gabriel Weber, whose contemporary & non-traditional quilt making focuses on the landscapes and regions the artists inhabit with elements including natural dyes from the Utah desert, imagery from the vast and textured sites of West Texas and crowd-sourced materials from rural Mississippi.

Debbie McMahon Fiber Symposium, established in 2010, was named in honor of a longtime San Antonio resident Debbie McMahon. McMahon, who passed away in September of 2007, was an accomplished and devoted fiber artist who participated as a student and Trustee at the Southwest School of Art. We are very grateful to Joe McMahon Jr. for creating an endowment in Debbie’s name to facilitate this annual conversation on contemporary fiber arts.

Anna Evans – Anna Evans’s multidisciplinary work centers around conceptual interpretation of desert ecology and culture in the Western United States. Her pieces literally start from the ground up: minerals/ochers she collects to create paint pigment, regional agate she cuts and polishes to build one-of-a-kind jewelry, and plants grown on her flower farm to produce color on fiber. She weaves together metaphysical symbolism, traditional quilt patterns, and Western iconography with a palette of docile desert tones to depict the place she inhabits and is most influenced by. Evans’ work is held in private and public collections such as the State of Utah Alice Merrill Horne Art Collection and The University of Utah Eastern’s Permanent Collection. In 2022 Evans was a Visual Arts Fellow with the Utah Division of Arts & Museums. Born and raised in Grand Junction, CO, Evans crisscrossed the western US and now lives in southeast Utah where she maintains her art practice.

https://annaevans.com/

Coulter Fussell – (b. 1977, Columbus, Georgia) is a visual artist who lives and works in Water Valley, Mississippi. Her practice spans quilting, upholstery and mixed media works that intersect photography and sculpture. 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 conflicts, both historical and current, with interpersonal psychodramas.

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 career diner waitress while raising her children in rural north Mississippi. During that time, she won numerous awards including the 2017 ArtsSouth Southern Prize Finalist, a 2019 United States Artist Fellowship, the 2021 Jane-Crater Hiatt Fellowship from the Mississippi Museum of Art and 2024 funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation of Visual Arts Exhibition Support Grant. Her work has been featured in 2024 art-book publication New Women’s Work: Reimagining “Feminist” Craft in Contemporary Art and Art In America. In 2025, she became a Yaddo Fellow, had her first solo show in New York City at MARCH Gallery and was featured at Arrival Art Fair with Wolfgang Gallery. Her work was named “Best of” by ArtNews for her showing at The Armory Show with Sheet Cake Gallery. Her solo show at The Mississippi Museum of Art opened in March 2026, immediatly followed by an upcoming solo show of new works at Southside Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi. In 2026, Coulter received Creative Capital/State of the Art funding, became a 2026 Hermitage Fellow and a 2026 Joan Mitchell Fellow. Having exhibited in numerous institutions and galleries across the South and New York City, Coulter is currently a full-time studio artist.

Julia Gabriel Weber – Julia’s work begins with photography—images made quickly and intuitively, often while traveling with her family between Texas and Oregon. These photographs emerge from moments of motion and interruption, when something in the landscape demands to be seen before it disappears.

She uses textile processes such as quilting and weaving to slow these images down. What starts as a fleeting photograph is translated into fabric through repetition, stitching, and labor, extending a split-second encounter into something deliberate and held. The transformation from lens to textile allows urgency and stillness to exist at the same time.

By merging photographic imagery with traditional textile practices, her work explores how memory is formed through movement, how time can be stretched through making, and how moments that pass quickly can be steadied through material and care.