Cleveland-born Frank Wilcox received artistic training with Frederick Gottwald, Henry Keller, and Louis Rorimer while at tending the Cleveland School of Art, 1906–10. On a travel scholarship from the school, Wilcox studied at the Académie Callorossi in Paris during the winter of 1910–11 and exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1911. He then returned to Cleveland, where the Taylor Gallery organized his first solo exhibition in the fall of 1911. The Korner & Wood Galleries organized his second solo exhibition in 1913, the same year he began teaching at the Cleveland School of Art. Among his students were Charles Burchfield, Carl Gaertner, and Clarence Carter. The Cleveland School of Art mounted a solo exhibition of his paintings (1916), and he exhibited in the annual May Shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1919–60). Wilcox made painting trips to Maine and the eastern seaboard during summers, 1920–25, and studied and painted in Paris, 1926–27. He established a reputation as a book illustrator with the publication of Ohio Indian Trails in 1933. In the 1930s his paintings appeared in group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and in New York at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Cleveland School of Art mounted a solo exhibition of his paintings in 1937. In the 1940s he made several painting trips to the American Southwest and illustrated a historical survey of the Ohio canal system. After retiring from the Cleveland School of Art in 1957, Wilcox continued to paint. "Transformations in Cleveland Art" (CMA, 1996), p. 240.
Biographical information exists in the Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.