Shirley Aley Campbell (March 26, 1925 – August 13, 2018) was a figurative realist painter, called "Cleveland’s own artistic blend of Alice Neel and Lucien Freud".

"[2] —Mindy Tousley, Executive Director, The Artists Archives of the Western Reserve "Shirley Aley Campbell has created a luminous career painting the invisible people.

For decades, that has meant she's painted the people most Clevelanders overlook: prostitutes, drag queens, gays and lesbians, and transgender individuals in a time when acceptance wasn't as readily available as today.

[4] Campbell distinguished herself at the Cleveland Institute of Art and graduated with the top honor awarded by the school, the Agnes Gund Memorial Scholarship.

"[6] One of Campbell's notable portraits is entitled Five Figure Exercise, Opus One, now in the permanent collection of the Butler Institute of American Arts.

[7] It depicts a group of persons who had in some way influenced Campbell's life: industrial designer Leon Gordon Miller, director of the Butler Institute of American Art Joseph Green Butler, chairman of the Humanities Department of Cuyahoga Community College Lawrence Vincent, literary critic and lecturer Eugenia Thornton Silver, and enamelist John F. Puskas.

[8] "Campbell’s interests have extended to celebrities (actress Margaret Hamilton, chanteuse Hildegarde), politicians (congresswomen Bella Abzug of New York and Mary Rose Oakar of Cleveland), fellow artists (Phyllis Seltzer, David E. Davis, Judy Takács, and Mindy Tousley), pianist Eunice Podis, race car driver Janet Guthrie, Olympic athlete Stella Walsh.

Talking with these women backstage, Campbell "learned the histories of their sad and often tragic lives and accepted their pretenses of having college degrees or reading Ecclesiastes.

[…] A biographical connection between artist and subject establishes a rapport that extends to and is expressed in the painting, so we can not only see the individual but also get a sense of the conditioning that has shaped her life.

Professor Walter Swyrydenko, chairman of the Fine Arts Department and gallery director, wrote, "In Campbell's most recent biographical series, one senses her strength and clarity of purpose.

[13] Erdelac sent Campbell to "Florida, the east and west coasts, England, France, Finland, and Sweden attending biking events and studying […] bikers.

The subject matter is diverse and [...] even includes a painting representative of a Vietnamese family fleeing Saigon [on a single motorcycle].

[4] Campbell also won the highest award of First Place at the Annual Cleveland Museum of Art May Show for three consecutive years from 1957 to 1959.

"[19] In 2011, Campbell's work was the focus of a three-part retrospective exhibition by The Cleveland Artists Foundation (now ArtNEO) entitled "The Way of All Flesh", spread among three venues across Greater Cleveland—the Beck Center for the Arts in Lakewood, the Cuyahoga Community College Eastern Campus in Highland Hills, and Convivium33 Gallery.

In 2014, Laura DeMarco of the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote, "Today, Campbell paints another marginalized group in society: the elderly.

Campbell's 1977 portrait of Congresswoman Mary Rose Oakar is part of the permanent collection of the ArtNEO Museum in Cleveland, Ohio.