Eleanor Spiess-Ferris
American painter
Eleanor Spiess-Ferris (born July 3, 1941) is an American symbolist painter cited as a significant surrealist, narrative figurative and feminist artist. Her numerous visual works display powerful influences of the Spanish and Native American cultures of Northern New Mexico, where she grew up. They often reference Penitentes (New Mexico), retablos, Kachinas and Native American fetishes and frequently incorporate themes of feminist spirituality, Indo-European mythology and personal memory.
Life
Spiess-Ferris was born on July 3, 1941, in Las Vegas, New Mexico and raised on a small farm there. Her mother, Harriette, descended from early Spanish settlers in the territory. Her father, Waldo Spiess, was an attorney of German/Irish/Mexican heritage who became Chief Justice of the New Mexico Appellate Court. She earned her BFA at the University of New Mexico and attended the Chicago Art Institute. She married Chicago artist and toy designer Mike Ferris (1938– 2000) in 1962. They had two children, artist Emil Ferris and Michael Ferris Jr., a New York sculptor married to New York artist Rosemarie Fiore. She and her husband lived briefly in Albuquerque and returned to Chicago in the late 1960s.
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This entry incorporates text from “Eleanor Spiess-Ferris” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.