Feature Articles

September Issue 2002

Gaston College in Dallas, NC, Features Works by Tom Stanley

Tom Stanley: Black Mountain Drawings will be on view through Oct.12, 2002, in the Jeanne Rauch Gallery at Gaston College in Dallas NC.

Stanley's Black Mountain Drawings exhibition feature works dating from 1994 through 2002. Most were completed during biennial retreats at the site of the former Black Mountain College near Swannanoa, NC. Others were executed with a similar attitude for art making while traveling and during studio time. All of these drawings inform Stanley's work over the past 10 years including his ongoing series titled en route to hamlet. "This is the first time I have shown these works, much less shown them as a body of related works," notes Stanley.

Works included in the exhibition range from acrylic on paper, ink on paper and sgraffito on ceramic plate.

Tom Stanley is a visual artist and director of Winthrop University Galleries, in Rock Hill, SC. He has served as director of the Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury, NC, and on the faculties of Barry University in Miami and Arkansas College in Batesville where he directed an internship program in historic preservation.

Stanley received a MFA in Painting and a MA in Applied Art History from the University of SC. Before graduate school, he worked as a resident designer in New Jersey and New York for Greg Copeland, Inc., a manufacturer of fashion oriented wall accessories for the international furniture market.

Over the past 10 years, Stanley's curatorial projects have included Across Generations: Catawba Potters and Their Art and Legacy of Survival: Seven Master Catawba Potters. His 1995 exhibition New South, Old South, Somewhere In Between was recognized by the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games Cultural Olympiad. New South, Old South will be reorganized in 2003 as a collaborative project with Charlotte's Levine Museum of the New South. Still Worth Keeping: Communities, Preservation and Self-Taught Artists, a 1998 exhibition that he co-curated for the South Carolina State Museum, revisited his first curatorial experience, Worth Keeping: Found Artists of the Carolinas that opened at the Columbia Museum of Art in 1981.

Stanley has also worked with the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, on exhibition projects about Carolina artists Gene Merritt and Brooks Yeomans. He recently co-curated an exhibition from the Collection in Lausanne with the late Geneviève Roulin titled Portraits et Personages: Selected Works from the Collection de l'Art Brut's Neuve Invention that opened at Winthrop in fall of 2001 before traveling to Wake Forest University and the College of Charleston's Halsey Gallery. In 2002 he curated an exhibition of works by Rock Hill artist Gene Merritt for the Musée Invention Franche. He has published articles about Merritt in London's Raw Vision and the Collection de l'Art Brut's L'Art Brut Fascicule 21.

In Sept. 2000, Stanley's two-year documentary project titled Remembering Ed: The Last Precisionist aired statewide. Co-produced with South Carolina ETV 'Remember Ed looked at the life of artist, educator and community activist Edmund Lewandowski (1914-1998).

Stanley's own artwork is represented by Hodges Taylor Gallery in Charlotte and City Art in Columbia. This year six of his small paintings on paper titled profiles en route to hamlet were included in an eight-person exhibition at the Musée de la Halle Saint Pierre in Paris. His paintings have been published in the Duke Endowment publication The Carolinas, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, and New American Painting published by Open Studio Press, Wellesley, Massachusetts. His work is included in numerous collections including the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching, Belmont Abbey's Monks Chapel, B.F. Goodrich, Womble/Carlyle, Duke University, and Davidson College. A twenty-panel installation of his ongoing project titled en route to hamlet was recently installed for the collection of the newly constructed First Charter Center at University Research Park in Charlotte. His newest works titled across the river, inspired in part by research of his grandfather's mysterious Mississippi River drowning in 1920 New Orleans, will be included in an exhibition this spring at Hodges Taylor Gallery.

For more information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings or call Gaston College at 704/922-6245.

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