J. Jay McVicker was an Oklahoma-born painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose career moved from prewar Regionalism through biomorphic and hard-edge abstraction across more than half a century at Oklahoma State University, and whose mastery of aquatint and intaglio printmaking produced one of the most consistent bodies of postwar American abstract printwork.
Jesse Jay McVicker (October 18, 1911 – August 31, 2004) was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Vici, Oklahoma, and a lifelong resident of Stillwater. He studied at the Southwestern Institute of Technology from 1930 to 1932 and at Oklahoma State University, where he worked under Ella Jack and Doel Reed and earned his BA in 1940 and MA in 1941. He joined the OSU faculty immediately after graduating, became head of the Art Department in 1959, and remained on the faculty until his retirement in 1977.
His early work was Regionalist in subject and handling, watercolours and prints of Oklahoma rural and farm life, but he turned decisively toward abstraction in the years immediately after the Second World War, drawing on Paul Klee and Juan Gris and moving across the next several decades through biomorphic, hard-edge, and constructivist idioms. He was particularly known for innovative aquatint and intaglio printmaking. His work was exhibited at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York (the predecessor to the Guggenheim), the Downtown Gallery in New York, and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris, and is held in the Dallas Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Harwood Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.