Frank Wilcox (b.1887-d.1964 )

Frank Wilcox was most famous for his watercolors. His mentors were Frederick Gottwald and Henry Keller and Louis Rorimer, and in 1913, he joined them on the faculty of the Cleveland School of Art where he taught drawing, painting, design and printmaking for 40 years to students like Carl Gaertner and Charles Burchfield. He won more than 30 awards in the May Show of the Cleveland Museum of Art and won the 1920 Penton Medal for sustained excellence. Wilcox attended the Berlin Heights Summer School and later summered in Maine and along the east coast, and much later in the southwest. He traveled to Europe and saw the Armory Show in New York City where he absorbed the new European aesthetic. His work was exhibited widely including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art n New York City. Wilcox was a reporter in words and drawing and painting—a master at watercolor. Perhaps most important to him was the record of Ohio —its countryside, canals, and all of the Indian trails drawn and painted with love and clarity. He personally researched miles and miles of canals and tow paths recreating an imagined past and the ways of the industrial, agricultural and economic growth of the region.