Working in a mature style for the last 20 years, Phyllis Staplers’ paintings are nationally recognized for their reductive compositions and flattened forms of animals and plants. Her activism for animal welfare has informed her work with an intensity recognized by museum curators, reviewers and collectors alike. New American Paintings, Art and Antiques, American Art Collector and Southwest Art are just some of the publications her images have appeared in. A graduate of the University of Georgia, Staplers’ life long residency in the south ended with a move to New Mexico in 1996. She currently resides in Durango, Colorado.

Always a champion of the underdog, her recent work has focused on endangered or extinct species including Tasmanian tigers, fossas, polar bears and wooly mammoths. By placing her subjects in a monochromatic negative space she represents a symbolic protective force field around them. Albuquerque Tribune critic T.D. Mobley-Martinez described her painting of a missing dog as “floating in a Dijon nowhere”. Mobley-Martinez continues, “Using an iconographic imagery and arrangement you might see in Eastern art, this work hints at a range of social and emotional issues from the disposable nature of nature to the yearning to be loved.”