Lily, one of our EAC Interns, writes about her first day at the Art Center and artwork by Eleanor Spiess-Ferris in the EAC Faculty Show 2026, on view from January 14 - February 15, 2026:
Upon entering the Evanston Art Center on a frosty January morning, ten minutes late due to the unforeseen snowstorm immediately following what felt like the dawn of spring (I will forever be humbled by the unpredictable Chicago weather), I took in a gallery illuminated by bright grey skies and soft snow kissing tall glass windows. My number one accomplice, my mother, texts me to remind me how being late on my first day isn’t ideal and how next time I must leave earlier than I did to allow for significant delays in all the modes of transportation I rely on. Today it was a bus, then an attempt at the train, which mockingly said it was twenty minutes away, then giving up and resorting to an Uber.
The artwork that instantly drew my attention in the first floor gallery was Eleanor Spiess-Ferris’ My Mother’s Chair. Maybe it was the gentle greys and baby blues in the piece directly paralleling the colors of today that caught my eye, but as soon as I read the title, I had my “in”. The synesthesia in me says that my mother used to be olive greens and burnt umbers. As of September of last year, when my father passed, she swiftly mutated into the colors of Spiess-Ferris’ piece.
Spiess-Ferris, with her origins lying in a small farm in northern New Mexico, studies the connection between human and nature, and how we as humans have an innate responsibility to nurture the earth we inhabit. This particular gouache on paper puts what one can assume is actually her mother’s chair on display, with a glass vase resembling an elongated body filled to the pelvis with water and holding four wilting yellow flowers. Sitting on top of a rock, the subject sits in front of a painting of a natural landscape. I imagine this is possibly a still from Spiess-Ferris’ hometown, full of Pinyon Pines and vast croplands and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The painting is completely in shades of grey, except for the narrow icy blue irrigation ditch which spills onto the gallery’s wooden floor that the chair rests on. The chair itself contrasts heavily with the painting behind it, offering life and comfort to a background that is otherwise dreary and still.
My mother is from the Bronx, so pretty much the direct opposite of Spiess-Ferris’ roots. My mother’s chair would be positioned in front of bodegas and taxi cabs and Yankees fans, with a small stream of sewage and rain water spilling onto the floor. Mother nature begs us to pick up our paper receipts (or just opt for e-mail) and rinse out our yogurt containers before tossing them in the recycling. And while I also believe we all have a part in nurturing our earth, at this particular point in time, I want to beg Mother Nature to nurture my grieving mother and refill her glass vase without hesitation. The world can look so cruel when it takes away the love of your life. It’s hard to opt for e-mail when the e-mail isn’t opting for you.
I gather from My Mother’s Chair that Spiess-Ferris holds a deep love and sympathy for her mother, letting her glass body stretch and keeping her on a cushioned pedestal out of harm’s way of the flowing stream. The chair absorbs her legs. The body is one with the chair. I wonder why her mother’s flowers have wilted. I hope one day her mother’s flowers can bloom again, and maybe for her landscape’s rapid brushstrokes to take on vibrant earth tones, as I hope the same for my own.