Amy Sherald, the Columbus-born artist who painted former first lady Michelle Obama’s official portrait, is on the inaugural TIME100 Art list and is the first living painter to appear solo on the magazine’s cover in 50 years. Sherald remembers being one of only several Black students attending a private school in Columbus. According to the National Museum of Women in…

Paul Pierce, retired producing artistic director of the Springer Opera House, grew up in Rome, Georgia, but his family ties to southern Georgia stretch back seven generations. Pierce’s ancestors moved to Georgia after purchasing land through the 1827 Land Lottery, an act which redistributed native people’s land to settlers. When Pierce moved to Columbus to…

A exhibition of Columbus native Coulter Fussell’s art, “The Proving Ground,” her first museum-organized retrospective, is now open at the Columbus Museum in Columbus, Georgia and will run until Jan. 3, 2027.

Coulter Fussell turned a Tupelo, Mississippi, mall T-shirt, beaver tails and a clogger’s petticoat into an entire exhibition, and now it will be displayed at the Columbus Museum. “The Proving Ground,” her first museum-organized retrospective, opens this weekend and will run until Jan. 3.

The Columbus Museum (COMU) will present “Coulter Fussell: The Proving Ground,” opening September 12, 2026. Born in Columbus and now based in Water Valley, Mississippi, Fussell transforms donated textiles, photographs, clothing, and found objects into richly layered quilt-based works that blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and storytelling. Organized by the Mississippi Museum of Art…

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…