Biography: Tom Stanley

Rock Hill, S.C., artist Tom Stanley (b. 1950), a native of Fort Hood, Tex., who grew up in Concord, N.C., is among South Carolina’s premier artists, art teachers, curators and arts administrators. He retired in 2017 as the chair of the Department of Fine Arts at Winthrop University, where he also for many years was the director of the department’s art galleries. 

Stanley will have a solo exhibition at Halsey Institute for Contemporary Art at South Carolina’s College of Charleston in May 2017. Since 1973, he has shown in some three dozen solo and two-person exhibitions, including in 2016 at the Casa-Museu Abel Salazar in Porto, Portugal, as well in some 70 group exhibitions. He was included in the 2004 S.C. Triennialat the South Carolina State Museum; Triennial Revisitedin 2011 and the 701 CCA South Carolina Biennial 2013 at701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, S.C.; and the S.C. State Museum’s 2012’s Abstract Art in South Carolina, 1949–2012. 

Stanley has exhibited throughout the Southeastern Unites States and elsewhere in the country and in Germany, Switzerland, France and Portugal. The exhibitions include those at institutions such as Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco; the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts; the National Art Club in New York; La Galerie du Marchéin Lausanne, Switzerland; Musée de la Halle Saint Pierre in Paris, France; the Columbia Museum of Art, University of South Carolina’s McKissick Museum, the Sumter County Gallery of Art and Myrtle Beach’s Burroughs and Chapin Museum, all in South Carolina; the McColl Center for Visual Arts in Charlotte, the Hickory Museum of Art, Greensboro’s Weatherspoon Art Museum and Greenhill Center for North Carolina Art, Raleigh’s Artspace and Winston-Salem’s Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, all in North Carolina; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond; and the Montgomery Museum of Art in Alabama.

Stanley has created some 10 public artworks in North and South Carolina and Arkansas, many of them with Winthrop colleague Shaun Cassidy. His work is in the many private, corporate and public collections, including the S.C. State Art Collection and those of the S.C. State Museum; Jean de Matini et Geneviève Roulin and the Offices of the Collection de l’Art Brut, both in Lausanne; Duke University; and the N.C. Center for the Advancement of Teaching in Asheville. He has curated or organized more than 40 exhibitions. In 1980, Stanley received an MFA in painting and MA in applied art history from the University of South Carolina; he received a BA in studio art in 1972 from Belmont Abbey/Sacred Heart Colleges in Belmont, N.C.