Theo Wujcik
An Artist's Artist

Theo Wujcik—punk, professor, painter, printmaker—a man unchained by convention who lived to his own beat. Recognized for his meticulous silverpoint portraits, and for dazzling, fragmented paintings, Wujcik, the man, and the artist were often misunderstood.

Local press created the myth of the Punk Professor, and often labels such as Pop artist, partier, ephemeral, and ironic were applied to him and to his work. Much like a metaphor from his chain-link fence motif, this often posed a barrier to his true artistic talent and gentle nature.

Theo Wujcik (1936–2014) was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. He was the ninth of ten children of Polish immigrants, Anna and Stanly Wujcik. As a child, Theo was constantly drawing. In 1954, he dropped out of the technical high school, and joined the Army Corps of Engineers and was stationed in France. While in the service, he created the posters for upcoming events and movies and was encouraged to return to New York to study art on the G.I. Bill. 

Attempts at school in Chicago proved too difficult as he realized he had never been on his own before and had difficulty with the lack of structure. He decided to try again and moved into a small apartment above a storefront in Detroit. He was determined to become disciplined to take his talents to the next level—something that would become his lifelong pursuit.    

Wujcik went on to study at the College for Creative Studies (CSS) in Detroit, under the modernist Sarkis Sarkisian. He spent a summer training with Bob Blackburn the art of lithography at the Creative Graphic Workshop in New York City. He read profusely and continuously studied on his own.

Wujcik went on to teach at the CSS prior to postgraduate work at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and with funding from a grant thru the Ford Foundation, he went on to train as a master printer at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Albuquerque, and in Los Angeles, where he printed for artists such as John Altoon, Ed Moses, Billy Al Bengston, and Ed Ruscha. At Gemini G.E.L., Wujcik printed for Jasper Johns.

Upon his return to Detroit, Wujcik cofounded the Detroit Lithography Workshop with Master Printer Aris Koutroulis. Wujcik began showing at the Donald Morris Gallery in Detroit, and continued to teach printmaking at CCS through 1970.  

In 1970, Wujcik moved to Tampa, Florida, to become director of Graphicstudio at the University of South Florida. There, he developed lifelong friendships and collaborations with Ed Ruscha, James Rosenquist, Richard Anuszkiewicz, and Larry Bell, among others.  

During the 1970s, Wujcik’s portraits of some of the leading artists of the time, Rosenquist, Ruscha, Anuskiewicz, Johns, Philip Pearlstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and others, were shown at Brooke Alexander Gallery in New York, and the Donald Morris Gallery in Detroit. His works were acquired by prestigious institutions and private collections. Collaboration, as a master printer and as an artist, was a necessary and important aspect of his creative process, along with his development of a number of new and highly original printmaking and painting techniques.  

From 1972 until his retirement in 2003, Wujcik taught drawing, painting, and printmaking at the University of South Florida. During his tenure, he worked closely with his students and built lasting relationships as a number of them went on to successful careers in the art field. Students sought him out and colleagues were inspired by his virtuosity; he was known for his incredible work ethic.

In 1979, his artistic focus shifted from drawing and printmaking to painting and mixed media. During this period, he spent time in local punk clubs where he found the music and slam dancing a major source of inspiration for his work.

Early in the 1980s, Wujcik began dumpster diving for materials he used in installations, entitled Combustibles (a nod to Rauschenberg’s Combine’s). During this time, he and some of his students formed a collective—a collaborative effort—ModoDado—that ended in 1984. They showed in abandoned buildings, streets, and other alternative locations around the Tampa Bay area, and Miami. He also convinced his close friend, Pop artist, James Rosenquist, to join in the events.  

It was his in-depth conversations and friendship with Rosenquist that led Wujcik to discover his signature chain-link fence motif. The Combustibles were the beginning of his exploration of this idea. But it was happenstance in 1984 that led him to an unraveling roll of fencing on a construction site. The image struck him and the beginning of a long relationship with the chain-link fence motif as a metaphor for exclusion, protection, oppression, etc., began, and a pivotal painting, Tampa Tornado, done that year, which marks his transition to painting.

Wujcik’s chain-link fence motif became a structural device as well as a visual language used to communicate multiple meaning. This motif provided a way of layering paint, story lines, and fragments of memories and ideas. It gave him a tool to explore themes and compositions from great art historical figures with a definitive style of his own. His us of collage or fragmentation, as vehicles to address contemporary sociopolitical and environmental issues.

Theo created chain link templates in various size links and layer them over layers of paper toweling and with an exacto knife, intricately cut out 100’s of pieces. The pieces were then laid on top of the painting and piece by piece the paint was laid on top. He writes in his journals that he created a hybrid painting/sculpture. That the chain link paper toweling served as a way to “hang” the paint. Other inventions of Wujcik’s include his origination of a printmaking technique, chiseled engraving, where he employs the use of a large chisel and hammer, typically used for striking and shaping wood or concrete, carefully carving a deeper line into a 1/8” zinc plate. Another interesting invention is his hybrid painting/drawing process in which he mixed charcoal powder and polymer emulsion and ‘drew/painted’ the mixture on to the canvas.

During the 1990s, Theo explored themes of appropriation, memory, celebrity, heartbreak, and others, and the motif of the chain-link fence, which came and went in his work, eventually becoming more of a graphic device as it was broken, pulled apart, flattened, and further fragmented. 

From 2000, Wujcik articulated more sociopolitical themes in his work, in addition to personal narratives. These subjects gave him an avenue to more deeply pursue his skills and maturity as a painter. Once again, he turned to the streets and dumpsters of Ybor City for subject matter, and found storylines and impulses emanating from discarded debris. His work has often been categorized as Pop, yet, his own brand of Pop, while at times playful and unexpected, was rarely ironic or cynical, departing from the traditional interpretation of the term. 

Wujcik’s work is in numerous museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Chicago Art Institute; Detroit Institute of Arts; Tampa Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami; Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, FL; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Library of Congress; and The National Gallery of Art. He also received numerous awards, including from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, a Ford Foundation Grant, an NEA Printmaking Fellowship, Richard Florsheim Art Fund, and the Edwin Austin Abbey Memorial Fund for Mural Painting.

Wujcik consistently worked to expand his range in subject and content, enlisting an array of styles that do not always conform to limiting categories. He was prolific and experimental up until his death in March 2014. Wujcik’s paintings are multilayered in meaning and content, and take time to absorb and are slowly revealed with each viewing. Theo Wujcik was and remains an iconic figure in the Tampa Bay cultural scene and his legacy will hopefully continue to exert an impact on subsequent generations.

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