McVicker's career is the long, deliberate working life of an artist-educator who built a serious modernist practice in a place that had none, Stillwater, Oklahoma, and whose four decades at the head of the OSU Department of Art shaped the institutional ground for postwar Oklahoma modernism.
McVicker came to art through the Oklahoma state-university system. The Southwestern Institute of Technology gave him his initial training, and his subsequent work at OSU placed him under Doel Reed, the leading American aquatint printmaker of the period, and Ella Jack, two teachers who set the technical foundations of his subsequent practice. The decision to join the OSU faculty immediately after graduation kept him in Stillwater for the rest of his working life, an unusual commitment for a painter of his ambition that gave him the institutional stability to develop his practice on his own terms.
His prewar Regionalist work fit comfortably within the dominant Oklahoma painting traditions of the period. The watercolours and prints he produced through the late 1930s and early 1940s registered the rural Oklahoma landscape and its farming communities, and were widely exhibited in regional shows. The wartime period and its aftermath, however, prompted a sharp redirection: by the late 1940s he had absorbed the lessons of European modernism, particularly the work of Klee and Gris, and committed himself to abstraction.
The development that followed across the 1950s and 1960s was unusual for an artist working in his region. Most Oklahoma painting of the period continued in the Regionalist and figurative traditions of Thomas Hart Benton and the Oklahoma muralists, while McVicker moved through a sequence of distinct abstract phases: biomorphic compositions in the late 1940s, colourful constructivist arrangements in the 1950s, hard-edge geometric work in the 1960s, and a final shift toward looser, more open compositions in the 1970s and beyond.
His parallel career as a printmaker produced his most distinctive body of work. The technical innovations he developed in aquatint and intaglio, building plates with multiple acid baths and complex tonal layers, gave his prints a depth and atmospheric quality that few of his contemporaries achieved, and the editions he produced were widely shown both regionally and at the major American and European print exhibitions of the period.
His department leadership at OSU shaped the institutional development of Oklahoma art education. Across the eighteen years he served as head of the Department of Art, he hired younger modernist faculty, expanded the curriculum, and helped to make Stillwater an unexpected centre of postwar Oklahoma modernism. The 2018 Centering Modernismexhibition and book at the OSU Museum of Art surveyed his career and reassessed his place within the broader American postwar art scene.