Bob Wade (artist)

[1] During 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.

When Bob arrived Austin in 1961 to attend the University of Texas he was driving a decade-old, customized Ford Crown Victoria hot rod.

His slicked back hair, the hot rod and his El Paso style earned him the nickname of "Daddy-O" from his Kappa Sigma His fraternity brothers.

In addition to his formal studies, Wade learned from the example of several Austin artists, including William Lester, Robert Levers, and Everett Spruce.

Wade helped create a small art community in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas with artists, George Green, Jim Roch, and Jack Mims.

One piece, ‘Gettin’ It on Near Cedar Hill’, a depiction of two heifers in a rather indelicate position, appeared in Art Forum in 1971, and was 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’.

Constructed from plywood, concrete, and earth, the map featured miniature oil wells, billboards, skyscrapers, and replicas of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River.

In 1976 Wade returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to recreate a Texas honky-tonk in the midst of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, cantilevered a taxidermied rodeo horse to a wall in the Tex-Lax exhibition at Cal State-Los Angeles, and turned the Lone Star state itself into a roadside attraction for the French with his Texas Mobile Home Museum in the Paris Biennale of 1977.

[8] Another documentary on Bob Wade's career, "Too High, Too Long and Too Wide," is by New York filmmaker Karen Dinitz and features his road trip across Texas in his Iguanamobile.

Completed using donated and scavenged materials, the boots stood nearly 40 feet tall and were installed on an empty lot near the White House at the northwest corner of 12th and G Streets NW.

Other works include giant armadillos, dancing frogs, urethane-foamed World's Biggest Cowboy Boots originally installed near the White House, a 70-foot-tall (21 m) saxophone and a New Orleans Saints helmet created from a Volkswagen beetle, currently atop the Shoal Creek Saloon in Austin, Texas.