Stacey Manela is an American painter whose work moves between figuration and abstraction, drawing from the mythology, visual language, and psychological terrain of the American West.
Working between Houston, West Texas, and Northern California, Manela builds paintings from fragments: figures, symbols, gestures, ornamental details, broken narratives, and expanses of charged color. Her background in information design and litigation graphics—where meaning is shaped through evidence, scale, omission, and tension—continues to influence how she constructs an image.
Her current series, Campo Solo, reimagines the West through solitary vaqueros, matriarchs, wanderers, saints, scorpions, and sentinels. These figures inhabit a world suspended between myth and fact, beauty and decay, humor and grit. They are alone, but never waiting to be rescued or found.
Across her work, Manela is interested in identity formed at the edge: between places, cultures, systems, and versions of the self. Whether working with a fractured signal or a masked figure, she returns to the same question: what remains when the familiar structure begins to break apart?
Manela’s paintings are held in private collections across the United States. She is also an information designer in litigation and the founder of Art of Facts.