Eleanor Spiess-Ferris: Daphne’s Sister

Curated by Doug Stapleton, Associate Curator of Art at the Illinois State Museum

Eleanor Spiess-Ferris (b. 1941) is an American symbolist painter cited as a significant surrealist, narrative figurative and feminist artist. This exhibition of over 40 years of painting and drawing by Chicago artist Spiess-Ferris traces the development of her distinctive figures across her career and compares studies and sketches with final works.  Spiess-Ferris’s figures are narrative bodies, telling stories of personal, spiritual and environmental crises. 

Image: Eleanor Spiess