Martha Ferris was named the recipient of the 2016 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Visual Arts for her 2015 exhibit, Foreign and Familiar Places, at Fischer Galleries. She is a mixed media artist whose paintings, murals, and large scale public works have been exhibited in galleries, museums, schools, parks and other public spaces across the country.
Her paintings on steel, paper, wood, canvas and clayboard, her three dimensional and brightly illuminated Blues Boxes, her mosaic splash pools, her wall sized murals, her silk screens, fabrics and prints tend to combine precise, even severe, geometric formalism with warm and inviting colors to create a surprising synthesis of discipline and joy.
All of her work, without exception, is deeply rooted in her sense of place.