Bob Wade

WADE, Bob "Daddy-O" Artist Bob "Daddy-O" Wade passed away December 24th at home in Austin aged 76. His art captured the spectacle, humor, and heart of Texas culture over a career that spanned the Whitney Museum, the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, the Royal Palace of Monaco, the truck stop at Carl's Corner, and everywhere in between. His ethos might best be summed up by words once emblazoned beneath his forty-foot iguana sculpture atop Manhattan's Lone Star Cafe: Too Much Ain't Enough. Born in Austin, Texas, on January 6, 1943 to Chaffin and Patricia Wade, his father's career as hotel manager made for Wade's wandering childhood across Texas from Hotel Galvez in Galveston to the Giant-era Paisano in Marfa. It was an El Paso adolescence that made the deepest impressions. Wade embraced custom car culture and Juarez nightlife, experiences that lent him a border-crossing sensibility, an irreverence toward authority, and a hot-rodder's hipness that earned him the enduring nickname Daddy-O. Wade attended the University of Texas at Austin from 1961 to 1965, taking art classes from Charles Umlauf by day and running wild with the Kappa Sigma fraternity by night. He continued his education at the University of California, Berkeley in 1965 and 1966. The Bay Area avant-garde offered Wade visions beyond Texas, from the Pop Art scrambling distinctions between high and low culture to the funk aesthetic of curator Peter Selz. Austin and Berkeley provided Wade's formal education, but when he moved to Waco, Dallas, and Denton to teach, his fine art training ran headlong into a fascination with the vernacular creativity and quirk of his home state. The singular way Wade combined academic technique with the anarchic grit of Texas culture defined the 1970s' surreal regionalism, the Texas Chic moment that also encompassed outlaw country music, Western fashion, and film. It was here Wade found his artistic vision, channeling Texas braggadocio and wheeler-dealer spirit into an art practice that, like Wade himself, was larger than life, a little bit outlaw, and a whole lot of fun. Wade had fellow travelers in a cohort dubbed the Oak Cliff Four: George Green, Jack Mims, Jim Roche, and Mac Whitney. Ken Harrison's 1975 film Jackelope documented the scene, placing Bob Wade center stage as he plumbed the absurdities of Texas culture in a moment when the state's swagger bucked against the national malaise. Wade's earliest works to draw attention were paintings, enlarged found photographs of eccentric Americanamost famously rodeo and borderlands scenesdelicately hand-tinted in the style of midcentury picture postcards. These works led to Wade's inclusion in the Whitney Biennials of 1969 and 1973 and remained a bedrock of his practice into the 21st century. Wade also evoked the same subject matter in immersive installations that recreated Texas spaces through cultural ephemera. The Texas Mobile Home Museum, his entry in the 1977 Paris Biennale, was the pinnacle of this concept: a 1947 Spartan trailer overflowing with taxidermy rattlesnakes, plastic bluebonnets, a two-headed calf, the leatherwork of artist Willard Watson, and a stereo soundtrack blaring Waylon Jennings. If Wade's paintings first drew art world attention, it was his monumental sculptures that caught the public imagination. From wire mesh, polyurethane foam, automotive parts, and the flotsam and jetsam of American consumerism, he would craft The World's Largest Cowboy Boots on a street corner in Washington D.C., and a football field-sized bicentennial U. S. map for Dallas. Of the works synonymous with the Daddy-O legend, though, few compare to the Giant Iguana Wade built at Artpark in upstate New York in 1978. He then took it to Manhattan, where it became an icon atop the Lone Star Café, a freewheeling capital of Texas Chic. The iguana migrated to the Fort Worth Zoo in 2010, the D.C. boots to San Antonio's North Star Mall back in 1979. A wealth of Wade art adorns Austin: the giant Saints helmet above Shoal Creek Saloon, the pistol patio at Ranch 616, the leaping bass aside Hula Hut. More than mere sculptures, these works are landmarks that anchor our experiences in the world and shape memories of place. In the 1980s, Wade moved to New Mexico, and it was there that he met and wed Lisa Sherman in 1985, his partner in all things since. The couple settled in Austin in the 1990s, and Wade remained inspired in his homecoming. His frenetic feats of alchemy over the past three decades have transformed a motorcycle into a hog, a bus into a taco stand, and a trailer into the visage of Kinky Friedman, for starters. A memoir, Daddy-O: Iguana Heads and Texas Tales, appeared in 1995, but Wade still had plenty of story ahead. The year 2020 promised to be busy for Daddy-O, with an exhibition at Austin's Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum and the publication of a career retrospective by Texas A&M Press. The book gathers dozens of tributes by collaborators, artists, and authors who have participated in Wade's long career. This, too, was a facet of his art, the way he connected and energized people, enlisting them in the vast ongoing project of being Daddy-O and making things. Over time, Wade's work built community, an entire Daddy-O universe, and though its sun will no longer be present in quite the same way, it will shine just as bright in memory, in spirit, and in the art Bob Wade made. The man was much more even than all this: a cousin of Roy Rogers, a yo-yo master, a postcard collector, a storyteller. But, above all, he was a loving husband, father, grandfather, and friend, survived by his wife Lisa Wade and their daughter Rachel Wade of Austin and Wade's daughter Christine Codelli, her husband David, and their children Ryan, Avery, and Cole, of San Diego, California.