What is it like to create a visual language? Eleanor Spiess-Ferris has, for five decades, done just that. She credits her New Mexican heritage as the root of her narrative, citing her fundamental interest in New Mexican folk art, Penitente death carts, and religious retablos. Since coming to Chicago in the early 1960s, Spiess-Ferris has honed her symbolic surrealism into a visual language using peccadillos, sea monsters, flora, and archetypal women—always accompanied by a variety of birds. Drinking the Moon tracks the artist’s narrative inventions from older oil paintings to her most current work in gouache. This exhibition explores how Spiess-Ferris creates a visual language through a myriad of compositions, becoming dark and brooding in some while being spirited and mirthful in others.
 

The Public Reception takes place on Thursday, July 10, 2025, from 5 - 8 p.m.

Viewings take place on Thursday, July 10 through September 19, 2025, during regular museum hours.