Tom Stanley is an artist and director of Winthrop University Galleries. Stanley’s curatorial projects have included New South Old South Somewhere In Between for Winthrop and the Levin Museum of the New South; Still Worth Keeping at the South Carolina State Museum; Portraits et Personages in collaboration with Switzerland’s Collection de l’Art Brut; Edge to Edge, an exhibition that focused on art of the 1960s for Bank of America’s Charlotte and San Francisco galleries; and Two Worlds Outside: Nukain Mabusa and Joshua Samuel for Winthrop’s South by South Africa project. 

 His own work was recently exhibited at Charlotte’s Gallery at Carillon; in Homegrown at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem and at Gallery twenty-four in Berlin.  In 2004, his Floating series was exhibited at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and the South Carolina State Museum’s Triennial Exhibition.  In 2002-03 he exhibited at La Galerie du Marché in Lausanne, Hodges Taylor Gallery in Charlotte, Musée de la Halle Saint Pierre in Paris and the Halsey Gallery in Charleston.  An 8-panel work from his ongoing series en route to hamlet is currently included in NASCAR Inspired at the Hickory Museum of Art. His paintings have been published in New American Painting 28 and 46; The Carolinas Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow; Geneviève Roulin; and The Drama. 

Over the past 15 years, Stanley’s works have been related to personal “journeys” in search of connection to place.  His pre-occupation with Hamlet in the mid-1990s was partly inspired by the kudzu-covered ruins of a turn-or-the-century mill west of Rockingham on Highway 74.  In like fashion, the two series, across the river and Floating, both relied on the artist’s research in pre-Katrina New Orleans as points of departure.  The boat-like representation in each Floating painting acts as a stage for images collected over years by the artist.  Though each image may have a specific reference, they are given broader meaning as silhouettes.  Architectural imagery in all of the work is partly influenced by the Precisionist style of artists like the late Edmund Lewandowski as well as the simplicity of American folk art.  The Floating compositions also have the potential to represent imagined Mardi Gras float design which, historically, were conceived as fantasy-like watercolors by international artists and designers.  Finally, The Neighborhood, like Floating and en route to hamlet, relies on mechanical drawing techniques as key to the artist’s process.  The Neighborhood attempts to address issues of the built environment, consumption and an estranged community in contemporary culture.