Bob ‘Daddy-O’ Wade, artist with many Fort Worth ties, died in December

Iggy at Fort Worth Zoo

1943-2019

Bob “Daddy-O” Wade

Austin-based artist Bob “Daddy-O” Wade, who had many local works on display, died just before Christmas last year. Wade helped bring Texas an avant-garde flavor with his works of art.

In Fort Worth, he is best known for his Giant Iguana, Iggy, that arrived at the Fort Worth Zoo in 2009. In 2012, an exhibit, Cowgirls and Critters, was at the William Campbell Contemporary Art space.

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His large, Iggy the iguana sculpture at the Fort Worth Zoo is owned by Lee and Ramona Bass and in on loan to the Zoo for display. Iggy arrived in June 2010 following the opening of the Museum of Living Art, the Zoo’s herpetarium.

Born in 1943, Wade was a highly regarded artist for more than three decades. Nationally, his work has been included in exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and internationally, in France, Germany, Japan, and Monaco, among other places. Wade has also exhibited work in the Whitney Biennial, as well as in biennials in Paris and New Orleans.

Wade’s works appear in numerous public and corporate collections, including those of AT&T, the Austin Museum of Art, Chase Manhattan Bank, Fidelity Investments, the Houston Museum of Art and Houston’s Menil Collection, the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, the Waterside development in Fort Worth, the State Capitol of New Mexico in Santa Fe, and the Pompidou Center in Paris, among others.

Wade received his BFA in painting from the University of Texas in Austin, and an MA in painting from the University of California, Berkeley. An ongoing freelance lecturer, he has also taught art at the University of North Texas in Denton, at Richland College in Dallas, and served as artist-in-residence at the Kansas City Art Institute and Northwood Institute in Cedar Hill, Texas. He has received three separate grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.