Bob "Daddy-O" Wade

Bob "Daddy-O" Wade (born 1943) is an artist in Austin, Texas who helped shape the 1970s Texas Cosmic Cowboy counterculture. A retrospective of his work was exhibited at the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture in the fall of 2009. He is best known for his creating oversized sculptures of Texas symbols and for experimenting with hand-tinting black-and-white vintage photographs transferred to large photo-emulsion canvases. His 40-foot-long (12 m) Giant Iguana sat on top of the Lone Star Cafe in New York City in 1978.

Son of a hotel manager, Wade grew up in several Texas cities. This early hotel life contributed to Wade's interests in the American road and highway kitsch. Finishing high school in El Paso, Wade joined a car club and would go south of the border to Juarez to enlist skilled technicians to customize his hot rod. Moving to Austin, Wade studied art at the University of Texas from 1961 to 1965. His slicked back hair, ’51 Ford hot rod and El Paso style earned him the nickname of “Daddy-O”. In addition to his formal studies, Wade learned from the example of several Austin artists, like William Lester, Robert Levers, Everett Spruce, and Charles Umlauf. Upon graduation from UT, Wade earned a Masters in painting at the University of California at Berkeley. There the artist connected his border sensibilities to the developing “funk art” pioneered by Bay Area curator and art historian Peter Seltz.

Following his time in Berkeley, Wade returned to his home state to make art and teach in Waco, Dallas, and Denton, successively. Wade helped create a small art community in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas with artists, George Green, Jim Roch, and Jack Mims. They became known as the Oak Cliff Four. Together they booked gallery shows and a group show at the Tyler Museum. In 1971, Dave Hickey’s South Texas Sweet Funk exhibition at Austin’s St. Edwards University catalyzed the art scene developing out of the Texas counterculture, bringing the Oak Cliff Four together with Jim Franklin, Gilbert Shelton, Luis Jiménez, and others. Wade soon turned to a new process with his work in photo-emulsion canvases, which quickly drew attention in the larger art world. One piece, ‘Gettin’ It on Near Cedar Hill’, a depiction of two heifers in a rather indelicate position, appeared in Art Forum in 1971, the work reviewed by Robert Pincus-Witten. Continuing this technique, Wade transferred vintage and Texas themed photos to photo-emulsion canvases on a large scale and applied color. These works include photos such as Mexican revolutionaries, a cowboy band, Texas boys and their guns, Yaquis, and his most well known, the 10' wide canvas, ‘Cowgirls on Harleys’.

...
Wikipedia