The Illinois State Museum serves the greater Chicago area through a program of traveling exhibitions from our Illinois Legacy Collection and innovative curatorial projects with partnering institutions. The Illinois State Museum promotes discovery, lifelong learning, and stewardship of the natural and cultural heritage of Illinois.
She’s a purveyor of vision, and leads us on a merry chase after, well, ourselves -James Yood, Eleanor Spiess-Ferris: An Appreciation, Sorrow of Swans, 2009
Eleanor Spiess-Ferris: Daphne’s Sister
Eleanor Spiess-Ferris (b. 1941, Las Vegas, NM. Resides, Chicago IL) is known for her distinctive approach to the figure, almost always women, who perform in dramatic settings. Her women are divas: larger than life, central to the story, and, like all good heroines, troubled by adversaries and circumstance.
Spiess-Ferris’s attention to the narrative body has deep art historical roots. Major influences are the visionary paintings of Hieronymus Bosch; Mannerist and Baroque arts attenuation of form and emotional atmosphere; Symbolist and Surrealist approaches to the fantastic, unreal situation and Feminist thought in the conflation of personal and political realities of women through history. Spiess-Ferris’s work is part of a strong tradition of figurative painting in the Midwest, which includes her contemporaries, Phyllis Bramson, Robert Lostutter, Tony Phillips, Christina Ramberg, and Suellen Rocca, along with modernist artists such as Gertrude Abercrombie, Ivan Albright, and Seymour Rosofsky.
In addition to her exploration of the figure, Spiess-Ferris also turns to the natural world for source material and inspiration. Her work is filled with birds, animals, flowers, trees, and water; constant companions and characters that help narrate the intertwined connection of humanity and nature. The questions of what animates and motivates us, as well as the consequence of our actions on the natural world, are central to her work.
This exhibition traces the development of Spiess-Ferris’s distinctive figures over 40 years of painting and drawing, often comparing studies and sketches with her final works. Spiess-Ferris has been drawing from a live model since the beginning of her career; an essential practice for her experimentation with the narrative figure. Her life studies often transform into their mythic selves in the process of a drawing session, shifting from observation into invention through distorting proportions and imposing natural forms as essential elements of the body.
Doug Stapleton, Associate Curator of Art, Illinois State Museum
(installation views: Eleanor Spiess-Ferris: Daphne’s Sister, Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL, October 26, 2019 - February 16, 2020)
…[T]he shift we undergo from our world to her world, the immersion into some parallel universe when nature, animals, and humans all exist, just as we think we know them, but now functioning as integers in surprising and evocative narratives of mystery and wonder …’ —James Yood, Eleanor Spiess-Ferris: An Appreciation, Sorrow of Swans, 2009, exhibition catalog
The exhibition title Daphne’s Sister references the ancient Greek story of the nymph Daphne, who is transformed into a laurel tree to save her from the god Apollo’s unwanted advances. Spiess-Ferris never names Daphne in her work, but the suffering and endurance at the crux of Daphne’s story resonates through it. Spiess-Ferris’ figures are often depicted as hybrid creatures part human and part tree or bird, acknowledging shape-shifting as a strategy for survival. What is important in Daphne’s story is not that Apollo claims the laurel tree as his emblem, but that Daphne survives and thrives as a new species.
This painting, Fecundity, 2013, is a Daphne-like figure. She is a hardworking woman; balancing twin swan filled pools in a field of pansies while standing on delicate twig legs. She is between being and becoming, harboring life in her hands, but cautiously eyeing two approaching funnel clouds. If fecundity is a powerful productivity, then it is difficult, precarious work. The painting asks how we keep our balance, our sense of right and wrong, in relationship to all that we juggle.
Figures are the essential storyteller in Eleanor Spiess-Ferris’s work. As such, the artist is more interested in how she can exaggerate her figures, bending, twisting and enlarging the forms to emphasize the emotional content of the work. Likewise, Spiess-Ferris is equally versed in rendering the figure with life-like realism. She has been involved for decades with the Evanston Figurative League, a group of artists who regularly draw from the figure as a means of honing their drawing and observational skills. Throughout the exhibition are examples of her drawings from the figure, which seem to stand in contrast to the exaggerated figures seen in the final paintings. Yet all of these images, from the quick contour sketch to the several hour-long poses from a model, speak to her understanding of how skin and bone, posture and gesture, can carry emotion and meaning. For her, imagination comes from observation, the original form elaborated and stretched into strange, new narrative figures.
Spiess-Ferris’s paintings are allegories of the tides of fortune and consequence played out in often absurd situations. Her cast of characters includes clowns, ghosts, swan women, goddesses, suited skeletons, hobby horses, scarecrows, and crows. Spiess-Ferris’s figures are sometimes the main character, other times they are bystander or victim, pecked at by scavengers or poked and prodded by Picadillos—clownish demons. Who are her companions—these beasts and birds that accompany and sometimes inhabit the figure—and what is their part in the drama? They represent our interconnection, our intertwined fate with the natural world. They accompany the heroine on her many journeys; the birds are her voice; the demons are the embodiment of the consequence of our actions on a world turning uninhabitable.
These characters inhabit various worlds. In her early paintings from the 1980s and 1990s, you find them in stage-like settings with the curtains pulled back, revealing a tumbling operatic scene. In her later work, her figures move out into the world, floating in dark watery expanses or dwelling deep in the forest, more of residents now than actors passing through the scene.
Spiess-Ferris’s earliest figures from the 1970s are rendered quickly, with a strong outline, minimal detail and broad strokes of color. These figures draw deeply on her childhood memories of northern New Mexico, especially the religious processions of the Spanish Penitentes and the ceremonies of the Pueblo Indians. In particular the sacred clown in Pueblo belief, a trickster who uses humor to make social commentary, has had a lasting impression on Spiess-Ferris’s figures. Northern Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch’s narratives scenes of Christian morality, heaven and hell as grotesque, carnival-like spectacle, also informs her work. These influences find bearing in her earliest paintings, such as the rainbow figure of I Met a Rainbow in Argyle and likewise in the drawing collage, Heaven, No Exit.
Spiess-Ferris's figures are rarely whole creatures. They are often depicted as fragments of a body or as hollowed skin or shell. The question of what animates us is central to her work. Is our outward appearance—how we present ourselves to the world—the true reflection of our inner life or just a costume we wear?
In Gray Room, 1980, Spiess-Ferris critiques the difficulty for women in finding their bearing and balance in a world where they are seen as sexual fantasies. The true person is not seen, only her ghost of a form, dressed up outlandishly. As a young artist finding her artistic voice, she used this ghost form repeatedly in her early work as an appraisal of female identity.
The idea of clothes animated to appear like human forms stem from Spiess-Ferris’s childhood memory of seeing clothes blown off a clothesline and caught up in tree branches. The clothes appeared to be alive as they billowed in the wind, as if the trees were dressing up to be recognized as human.
The memory of family from her New Mexican childhood inspire Spiess-Ferris’s Wild Stick figures, which are part of a series recollecting the daring exploits of her Aunt Maggie on horseback as well as her own memories of riding her palomino horse Snake. The memories—faded with the years and informed by pressing issues of adulthood—become ghost women riding hobby horses in a raucous race. Hobby horses symbolize a repeated activity—something we return to again and again—and these figures seem to be endlessly, urgently racing through time and space.
Birds are a constant companion and inhabitant in Spiess-Ferris’s work; their chorus is its voice and breath. Birds inhabit the figure, nesting and finding protection in the limbs or the folds of the body. In River, 2012, they are an exposed nerve, a life force on a string held suspended above flowing time. James Yood wrote, ‘Birds are almost everywhere in her work as well, preening, pricking, nesting, cavorting, instinctive foils for the humans they abut, in their lust and vanity and hunger to survive becoming just like us.*’
* James Yood, Eleanor Spiess-Ferris: An Appreciation, Sorrow of Swans, 2009
Eleanor Spiess-Ferris’s paintings balance absurdity and compassion. At first glance, we recognize their theatricality: outlandish costumes and hairstyles coupled with contortionist poses and dramatic lighting, which give the appearance of high comedy and satire. But the central storytelling brings us back to our own humanness and to the natural world, especially our relationship with water. There is a strong liaison with water—tears, sorrow, and regeneration—in Spiess-Ferris’s work, but rarely is this element single-purposed. In Tears, 2007, weeping women cry into vials that than pour out on the land, flooding the landscape. One woman offers small candle boats as an act of remembrance, while another carries her ancestors floating in her bowl-shaped head. In an interview, Spiess-Ferris explains,” Grief is not just totally bad—something comes out of it. … [S]he creates …by crying …she creates the environment in which the birds and things can exist through her grief. She’s an ecosystem. And she cries and will forever cry, but with her tears comes life.” *
*Gavin Van Horn, 2013, June 7, The Artist Who Would Be Crow, Center for Humans and Nature, www.humansandnature.org
Spiess-Ferris’s figures, armored and constricted in cloth as tight as skin, bristle in quilted or scaled discomfort. Bodies twist and double over or distort to resemble strange bug carapaces, as in A Small Sound, 2016. Deliberately distorted, these figures act as a visceral reminder of how we feel emotions in our bodies. There is something powerful in the contorted figures, which, like clowns and jesters, use absurdity to drive home a pinprick of recognition of ourselves.
In Islands, 2002, garland-wreathed heads float as a silent procession in a sunken, twilight world, each person calmly surveying the darkness by the light of a powerful spirit lamp. Are these heads the islands of this title, or is the island our collective humanity afloat in a larger world full of unknowns? Some figures sport elaborate collars or wreaths of flowers around their neck, while another wears a wooden dunce hat full of birds. In the middle, one man balances a single white lily stalk, symbolizing the Virgin Mary—the compositional centerpiece of this procession of hope and mercy. ‘The theme of caretaking strongly transmits,’ writes nature and ethics scholar Gavin Van Horn. ‘There is a guarded optimism in the organic intertwining of human and nonhuman life, in which heads become lifeboats, thoughts become branches filled with song and chatter, and bodies are pierced and re-aggregated into something greater than their parts.*’
*Gavin Van Horn, 2013, June 7, The Artist Who Would Be Crow, Center for Humans and Nature, www.humansandnature.org
I wish there were better words to describe the emotional tenor of a work by Spiess-Ferris, melancholic, brooding, wistful, heartfelt, poignant, tragic, tender, etc., none fully does the trick, but in some combination, help to gauge the psychological temperature that she regularly achieves. The complex Inflated, Egos, 2008, is so diverse and rich, it takes us to a place of dreams and nightmares, fireballs cascading from the orange and apocalyptic sky while, in a sliver of blue water, a few of Spiess-Ferris’s signature actors and actresses float about on or among some very expressive swans. There’s a hothouse and claustrophobic feeling here, we see broad areas of suggestive emptiness juxtaposed with an intense but ambiguous narrative episode. Why are these curiously costumed individuals sailing about, … sporting inefficient and symbolic umbrellas and the like… what is their relationship to one another, are they vulnerable or somehow self-contained? More questions than answers, as is often true in this artist’s work—but images such as this provide that aperture to wonder and imagination that invite us to speculate and fantasize, to question and, finally, to surrender.
James Yood, Eleanor Spiess-Ferris: An Appreciation, Sorrow of Swans, 2009
(installation views: Eleanor Spiess-Ferris: Daphne’s Sister, Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL, October 26, 2019 - February 16, 2020)
Eleanor Spiess-Ferris: Daphne’s Sister was presented at the Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL, October 2019 - Feburary 2020, and at the Evanston Art Center, Evanston, IL, March 2020.
Eleanor Spiess-Ferris: Daphne’s Sister travels to Evanston Art Center
Join us at the Evanston Art Center for a reception to celebrate the opening of Eleanor Spiess-Ferris: Daphne's Sister.
Eleanor Spiess-Ferris (b. 1941) is an American 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.
This exhibition has been curated by Doug Stapleton, Associate Curator of Art, Illinois State Museum
Figurism: Narrative and Fantastic Figurative Art from the Illinois State Museum Collection.
presented at the Schingoethe Center of Aurora University, 347 S. Gladstone Ave., Aurora IL 60506-4892
Exhibition dates: February 11 - April 24, 2020
opening reception: Tuesday, February 11, 5-6:30 pm.
visit: auartsandideas.com or call 630-844-4924
FIGURISM brings together modern and contemporary artwork from the Illinois State Museum collection that emphasizes the power and range of the narrative and expressive figure in Midwestern art. Featured artists include Gertrude Abercrombie, Ivan Albright, Phyllis Bramson, Eldzier Corter, Riva Lehrer, Gladys Nilsson, Ed Paschke, Tony Phillips, Judy Raphael, Barbara Rossi, Elenaor Spiess-Ferris, and Karl Wirsum.
Curated by Doug Stapleton,Associate Curator of Art, Illinois State Museum
Frick Center, Founders Lounge
Elmhurst College
190 Prospect Ave.
Elmhurst, IL 60126
Reception: Tuesday, October 9
4:30-6:30pm, Artist Talk @ 5pm
Free and open to the public.
For information call (630) 617-6110.
www.elmhurst.edu
Directions and map
Jeanine Coupe Ryding is best known for her richly layered, inventive, and often monumental, woodcut prints. Her forms and color record her observations of nature and of daily life, described in her expressive gestural cutting into the wood block plate. “I am often thinking of a three-dimensional shape and then describing it as I carve the block,” the artist writes in her statement. Ryding exploits the difficult medium of woodblock carving to create a wide range of calligraphic and seemingly effortless energetic lines and shapes. Her work is a meditation on the dynamic tension between object and ground, stillness and movement.
The exhibition will feature 25 large scale prints, 11 artist books, and 8 collages. Jeanine Coupe Rydings’ prints and artist’s books are in museums and private collections throughout the U.S., Europe, and Japan. In addition to her art, which focuses primarily on woodcut prints, etchings, artist’s books, drawing, and collage, she has also founded both Shadow Press and Press 928 in Evanston, Illinois, for fine art publishing. She received her BA from The University of Iowa and her MFA from Universitat der Kunste, Berlin, Germany. Her work has earned prestigious awards such as the Illinois Arts Council Award, and she has had residencies at Arts Midwest, the Frans Masereel Center in Belgium, and at Anchor Graphics in Chicago. She’s also been teaching as an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Print Media Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1991.
Jeanine Coupe Ryding: Coda for the Day has been organized for Elmhurst College by Doug Stapleton, Associate Curator of Art, Illinois State Museum. The exhibition will travel to the Illinois State Museum in Springfield in February 2019.
The Illinois State Museum is pleased that Suellen Rocca’s painting Blue Policeman / Eek,will be on view as part of the Hairy Who? 1966-1969 exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibition runs September 26, 2018–January 6, 2019. Read more here.
Suellen Rocca (American, b. 1943), Blue Policeman / Eek, c.1966, oil on canvas, 16 x 12″, Illinois Legacy Collection, Gift of Chuck Thurow, 2016.21.069.
Hairy Who? 1966–1969 is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.
Three sculptures by Theodore Halkin from the Illinois State Museum’s art collection will be view in the upcoming exhibition 3-D Doings: The Imagist Object in Chicago Art, 1964-1980 at the Tang Museum of Art in Saratoga Springs, NY.
Don Baum, Roger Brown, Sarah Canright, Dominick Di Meo, Eleanor Dube, Ed Flood, Art Green, Red Grooms, Ted Halkin, Philip Hanson, June Leaf, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Christina Ramberg, Suellen Roca, Barbara Rossi, Evelyn Statsinger, Stephen Urry, H.C. Westermann, Karl Wirsum, Ray Yoshida
September 8, 2018 - January 6, 2019
The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
read more about the exhibition here.
pictured above: Theodore (Ted) Halkin (American, b. Chicago IL, 1924), House 6, 1971-75, plaster, pillow with cotton case, woven mess with cellophane, 11 x 11 ½ x 6 ½ “ (house), 5 x 17 x 22” (pillow), 2001.22.39, gift of the artist.
House 7, c. 1971-75, mixed media sculpture/piece fake fur over an armature, fiber, found metal case with plastic handle, 12 x 9 x 7” (house), 14 ¼ x 10 ¼ x 5 ½ “ (case), 2001.22. 37, Gift of the artist.
House 10, c. 1971-75, mixed media sculpture/castable material or concrete, metallic paint, embroidered pillow with lace trim, 7 x 5 x 5 ¾” (house), 1 ½ x 11 x 11” (pillow), 2001.22.40, Gift of the artist
3-D Doings is organized by Tang Museum Dayton Director Ian Berry and Chicago-based curators and scholars John Corbett and Jim Dempsey. The exhibition and subsequent catalog are funded in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art, as part of Art Design Chicago.
Jeanine Coupe Ryding: Coda for the Day. This exhibition features 25 prints, along with artists books and collages, from the last ten years of the artist’s 50 year career. Curated by Illinois State Museum’s Associate Curator Doug Stapleton.
images: Don Baum, Untitled (Domus), n.d.. assemblage, 17 3/8 x 15 x 9”, Judith Brotman, Natural Selection, 2005, Mixed media- embroidered leaves, 6 ½ x 4 ¼” , Tom Denlinger, Example B (Territorial series), January 1992, 1992, mixed media on paper, 15 ¼ x 15 ¼ x ¾ “ , Michael Hernandez de Luna, La Cucaracha (detail), 2000, 3/200 ed., Digital print, 10 ¾ x 8”, David Kargl, Wind, 1986, mixed media, 36 x 30 x 1.5”, Suellen Rocca, ‘Eek,’ n.d., oil on canvas, 20 x 16". All Gift of Chuck Thurow, Chicago IL.
A gift of over 100 contemporary artworks has recently been given to the Illinois State Museum by Chicago collector and arts advocate Chuck Thurow. This is a significant addition to our permanent collection of outstanding work by Illinois related artists, and is one of the largest, single donations of artworks in the museum's 139 year history. There are 56 artists represented in this gift; 34 of which are new to our museum collection. The gift includes artworks by Dawoud Bey, Phyllis Bramson, Margaret Burroughs, Theaster Gates, Neil Goodman, Jackie Kazarian, Gladys Nilsson, Paul Sierra, Eleanor Spiess-Ferris, and Karl Wirsum.
Mr. Thurow was the Executive Director of the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago from 1998 to 2010, during which he fostered direct engagement between artists and supporters through innovative exhibitions and commissioned projects. Mr. Thurow's collection reflects that passion for a lively relationship between art and life. The Illinois State Museum is grateful to Chuck Thurow for his generous gift and support of our Museum's mission.
Debra Yepa-Pappan, ‘Live Long and Prosper (Spock Was a Half Breed)’, 2014 version, digital print, courtesy of the artist (top) & Chris Pappan, ‘Parallels 2, lithography and mixed media, courtesy of the artist (bottom).
Footprints Through Time: Artists Inspired by History exhibition.
Gallery Talk: Chris Pappan & Debra Yepa-Pappan a free, noon-time event all are welcome
Please join us for a lively and informal gallery talk by exhibiting artists Chris Pappan & Debra Yepa-Pappan. Both artists are participating in our current exhibition ‘Footprints Through Time: Artists Inspired by History,’ and organized by Associate Curator Jane Stevens.
Chris Pappan is Osage, Kaw, Cheyenne River Sioux, and mixed European heritage. His work strives to make people aware that Indians are still alive and helps to change the distorted image of Native Americans in the collective consciousness.
Debra Yepa- Pappan visually explores what it means to be mixed race, a Jemez Pueblo and a Korean artist in Chicago. In her "Live Long & Prosper (Spock Was A Half-Breed), Debra placed her face on an Edward S. Curtis photograph of a Plains Indian woman with tepees behind her to juxtapose herself with a stereotypical image of Native Americans.
Panel/Discussion Footprints Through Time: Personal Histories and Shared Culture
Saturday, May 30th, 11:00 am to 12:30 pm
(Enter through the LaSalle Street door only)
Join us for a discussion on personal histories and shared culture. We will discuss the common threads connecting us all.
Panelists:
Frances L. Hagemann, Ojibwe/Metis, Historian, PhotographerFrances will discuss how visual images were critical to passing down tribal history combined with storytelling since there was no Native American written language.
James Mesple, Chicago artist, focuses on personal histories and the status quo. How well do people know their own histories and their cultural histories?
Joyce Owens, artist, Associate Professor and curator at Chicago State University, will discuss the importance of inclusiveness. Joyce creates portraits and constructions to place in context the African-American presence within the larger world, in hopes of putting race in its place, as Anthropology rather than Sociology.
Norma Robertson, Dakota, artist, and Robert Wapahi,Dakota/Santee, artist, will discuss the history and changes to tribal names as European explorers came into their area.
Marjorie Woodruff, Chicago artist, educator, will discuss her "Ghost Tree Project" and environmental concerns affecting histories of old growth forests.
March 30, 2015 - Friday, April 03, 2015 , 7:00 AM - 6:00 PM
ISM Chicago Gallery Special Exhibition in the Thompson Center Atrium
The ISM Chicago Gallery in collaboration with the Native American Curators Ernest M. Whiteman III (Northern Arapaho) and David Spencer ( Mississippi Chata/Dine) presents work by Native American artists.
ICONOCLASTS: Native Art of a Non-Native Nature
For so long, the images, iconography, and cultural information of Native American Art that goes out to the world has been the providence of the Art Experts, Art Collectors, and Buyers. The authority over Native arts, however contemporary, has been given endorsement by how much an art piece sells for, practically buying the voice of Native peoples away from the artists for decades.
In the Pay for Play doxa of the New Reservation System of the Native Arts Markets, whoever is able to sell the most marketable Native Art is considered the "best" Native American Artist. Yet, to make an art piece marketable enough to sell, an artist typically creates a piece with many clichéd, historical, hackneyed, and stereotypical imagery as possible. Even when touting the "deconstruction" of such stereotypes, they are still selling out such cultural touchstones to the highest bidder, they are still putting out those images out there to an audience that probably cares for nothing other than owning the piece, and having the authority over its message, imagery, and voice.
The challenge then becomes, how do you honestly express yourself as a Native Artist without using the "classical" imagery associated with Native American cultures, without using the clichéd, historical, hackneyed, and stereotypical imagery? That is what this display attempts to do. Then, by not using cultural touchstones to "deconstruct" the stereotype, we as unlabeled artists, we deconstruct the very nature of "Native American Art" itself.
Exhibition Curator
Ernest M Whiteman III
Northern Arapaho
For more information please contact Jane Stevens, 312-814-5318,
[email protected]
Atrium Hours: 7:00 am to 6:00 pm.
Free and open to the public
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