Artist Bio & Statement

Born 1950 in Fort Cavazos, Texas, Tom Stanley has been working as a visual artist for over fifty years. After earning an MA in Applied Art History and an MFA in Painting from the University of South Carolina in 1980, he served on the faculties of Arkansas College (now Lyon College) in Batesville, Arkansas and Barry University in Miami, Florida. He was director of the Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury, North Carolina, from 1985 until 1990 when he then became the first full-time director of Winthrop University Galleries in Rock Hill, South Carolina. For 10 years he served as chair of Winthrop’s Department of Fine Arts until his retirement in 2017. He currently resides in Durham, North Carolina.  

An abiding curatorial interest in the work of self-taught artists, his first exhibition Worth Keeping: Found Artists of the Carolinas (1980) opened at the Columbia Museum of Art. He revisited the exhibition with Still Worth Keeping in 1997 at the South Carolina State Museum. Currently he is researching and cataloging the work of self-taught South Carolina artist Gene Merritt (1936-2015) who exhibited at the Collection de l’Art Brut in 1998 and has received attention for his methodically drawn and labelled portraits.

As an artist, Stanley works in series with limitations of size, color and imagery.  He uses recurring shapes such as triangles and figurative elements of houses and boats. Typical media are acrylic on canvas and on paper. Although using common graphic strategies like mechanical drawing, silhouette, and sgraffito, his painting is reliant on evolving techniques that he has discovered in the process of making.  

Stanley’s creative work has been exhibited at Hodges Taylor Consultancy, Charlotte; Hampton III Gallery, Greenville; The George Gallery, Charleston; if ART, Columbia; Fine Arts Center, Greenville; Artspace, Raleigh; 701 Center for Contemporary Art, Columbia; Charlotte’s Gallery at Carillon; and SECCA, Winston-Salem. His 2004 Floating series was exhibited at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. He has exhibited internationally at gallery twenty-four, Berlin; La Galerie du Marché, Lausanne; Musée de la Halle Saint Pierre, Paris; and the University of Porto’s Casa-Museu Abel Salazar, Portugal.  His exhibition Tom Stanley: Scratching the Surface was featured at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in 2017, Charleston, South Carolina.

Since 2007 he has worked on public art projects including elements for the CATS light rail Tom Hunter Station in Charlotte. Several of the projects including Time Further Out in Mathews and Journey in Raleigh were in collaboration with colleague Shaun Cassidy. Stanley is a recipient of Winthrop University’s Medal of Honor in the Arts, and the Governor’s Award in the Arts.  In spring 2018 he completed a six-week residency as visiting artist at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, and worked with Casa-Museu Abel Salazar, University of Porto in Portugal, on a temporary site project for their chapel, Layers: On-Site Installation. In April 2019 he completed an 8-month residency at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation where he also served as visiting curator. In February 2020 Stanley was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst.

Current activities include an ASC public art commission for a City of Charlotte Infrastructure Improvement Project along Tom Hunter Road in the Hidden Valley neighborhood; an exhibition of the last work completed in his South Carolina studio, Typical Trees and Other Small Works, opened at Charleston, South Carolina’s George Gallery in November 11, 2021; and in January 2023 Lander University in Greenwood, South Carolina, opened the exhibition New Space/New Work which featured paintings from his studio space in Durham, North Carolina. He is co-curator with Lia Newman, Director of Davidson College’s Van Every / Smith Galleries, the exhibition True Likeness that continues to travel with its current venue the Gregg Museum of Art and Design at NC State in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Recent one-person exhibitions have included Painting and drawing and discovering a practice at the Sarah Moody Gallery, University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in August/October, 2023; and Uncharted Water at Hampton III Gallery in Taylors, South Carolina in 2024. An exhibition of recent work titled Moving Onward will open at the George Gallery in Charleston, South Carolina November 1, 2024.

See CV here.