The Butler Institute of American Art presented 16 paintings and mixed-media works by Paul Stanley in the 2023 exhibition The Other Side.
The Youngstown museum placed Stanley’s visual practice within an institution devoted to American art rather than treating it as memorabilia from his music career.
Portrait and abstraction through direct visual impact
The exhibition included new acrylic paintings and mixed-media originals.
Stanley worked through large scale, heavy texture, strong colour and simplified imagery. His subjects moved between portraiture and abstraction, with an emphasis on emotional immediacy rather than detailed realism.
Visual design had long been part of Stanley’s work. He created the Kiss emblem and contributed to album covers, stage environments and clothing.
A public practice developed beyond performance
Stanley described painting as a major independent part of his creative life.
His works had been acquired by collectors and shown through commercial galleries before the Butler Institute exhibition.
The museum presentation offered a more focused context, allowing the paintings to be considered together and separated from the stage spectacle associated with Kiss.
An opening fundraiser supported improvements to accessibility at the museum, while the exhibition itself remained free to the public.
Celebrity can attract attention to work before audiences have judged it visually. The Other Side did not remove that problem, but it created conditions in which Stanley’s paintings could be assessed as a sustained body of work rather than an occasional extension of his public image.
The title suggested the exhibition’s central claim: the visual artist was not a newly invented identity but another side of a creative practice developed across several decades.