M. Louise Stanley is an American painter known for irreverent figurative work that combines myth and allegory, satire, autobiography, and social commentary. Writers such as curator Renny Pritikin situate her early-1970s work at the forefront of the "small, but potent" Bad Painting movement, so named for its "disregard for the niceties of conventional figurative painting." Stanley's paintings frequently focus on romantic fantasies and conflicts, social manners and taboos, gender politics, and lampoons of classical myths, portrayed through stylized figures, expressive color, frenetic compositions and slapstick humor. Art historians such as Whitney Chadwick place Stanley within a Bay Area narrative tradition that blended eclectic sources and personal styles in revolt against mid-century modernism; her work includes a feminist critique of contemporary life and art springing from personal experience and her early membership in the Women's Movement. Stanley has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been shown at institutions including PS1, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), The New Museum and Long Beach Museum of Art, and belongs to public collections including SFMOMA, San Jose Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, and de Saisset Museum. Stanley lives and works in Emeryville, California.
Early life and career
M. Louise Stanley was born in Charleston, West Virginia in 1942, and grew up in South Pasadena, California. Her parents, William ("Bill") and Marie Stanley, both children of missionary parents, first met in China as teenagers. After their families later re-settled in the United States, they reunited, married, and had three children, Louise, Susan and Alfred; Bill became an analytical chemist, and Marie, a chemical laboratory technician. Louise took an early interest in classical art and illuminated manuscripts (including the Gutenberg Bible) through visits to the nearby Huntington Library. She learned to paint alongside her father, who was an accomplished watercolorist, and in his retirement, a violin-maker.
Stanley attended the conservative, Brethren La Verne College (BA, 1964), supplementing her studies by motor-scootering to Scripps College for life drawing classes. In 1965, she moved to the Bay Area and enrolled at California College of Arts and Crafts (BFA, 1967; MFA, 1969), where she found a like-minded community. She studied with Peter Saul and was influenced by H. C. Westermann and sources such as Outsider art, underground comics, and the Alameda flea market. In the early 1970s, she was one of the early Bay Area artists to join the emerging Woman's Movement, along with Judith Linhares; their organized group of women artists took part in several gender-focused exhibitions that helped to establish the legitimacy of personal, narrative-based and feminist work.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Stanley began teaching, lecturing and exhibiting across the country, including solo shows at PS1 and Women's Interart Center (New York) and Matrix Gallery (UC Berkeley), the Rena Bransten and Quay galleries (San Francisco), and Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum; she also appeared in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Art Institute, Newport Harbor Museum, The New Museum and Fashion Moda (New York), de Saisset Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and Artists Space (1988), among others. Her first trips to Italy in the 1980s inspired new classical elements in her work, as did her personally conducted "Art Lover's Tours" to Europe, which began in 1994 and numbered fourteen in total.
In subsequent years, in addition to gallery shows, Stanley has received retrospectives at the SFMOMA Artist's Gallery (1999) and Dominican University (2007) and solo shows at the Richmond Art Center, Kala Art Institute (2019), and MarinMOCA (2021); she has participated in major group shows at The Drawing Center, San Jose Museum of Art and Oakland Museum, among others. She is represented by Anglim/Trimble in San Francisco.