Theo Wujcik, an artist revered for his prolific art-making, his collaborations with other artists as a master printer, and his teaching as an art professor at the University of South Florida over 33 years, died on Saturday evening in Tampa at the age of 78. Wujcik's artworks were collected by major museums nationally, but his local renown stemmed also from his role as a mentor to younger artists and his reputation as a tireless dancer at nightclubs near his Ybor City studio.
The cause was cancer, which had spread from Wujcik’s abdomen to his lungs and brain since last fall, said Stanton Storer, a friend and collector of Wujcik’s artwork. Characteristically, despite limitations imposed by surgery and chemotherapy, Wujcik filled the final months of his life with artistic productivity, completing a series of large-scale portraits of other artists for an exhibition in Dallas with the assistance of two former students, artists Peg Trezevant and Kirk Ke Wang. At a reception for the exhibition earlier this month, artists James Rosenquist and Ed Ruscha — Wujcik’s longtime friends and subjects of two of the portraits — joined Margaret Miller, director of the USF Contemporary Art Museum, in a conversation about Wujcik, who participated via Skype from a Tampa hospital.
Wujcik was born in Detroit and trained as a master printer at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles before arriving in Tampa in 1970 to oversee printmaking at the University of South Florida’s then-fledgling Graphicstudio. After a year as studio manager, he became a faculty member in the art department, where he taught until 2003. After achieving national attention and market success for his meticulously drawn portraits of other artists in the 1970s, Wujcik embarked on a career of stylistically diverse art-making that included the formation of a Tampa-based, Dada-inspired art collective called Mododado. The change caused Wujcik to break with his commercial gallery in New York but established him as the main event in Tampa’s artistic scene, a position he occupied for the remainder of his life.
Wujcik is survived by his second ex-wife, Susan Johnson, who was his caregiver through cancer, and three daughters, Anna, Kathryn and Frankie.
