Earl Biss

Earl Biss (1947–1998) was a Crow artist born in Renton, Washington, who spent much of his career in Taos, New Mexico, and became one of the most celebrated Indigenous painters of the American West. His large-scale canvases — dense with color, movement, and Crow ceremonial imagery — occupied a space between abstraction and cultural representation that was entirely his own, drawing on both the gestural energy of postwar American painting and the deep visual tradition of his Crow heritage. Biss attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, where he was part of the generation of Indigenous artists who studied under Allan Houser and Fritz Scholder and absorbed the lesson that Native artists had the right — and the obligation — to engage the full range of contemporary painting on their own terms. His early work showed the influence of this training, but he quickly developed an approach that was unmistakably personal: thick, impastoed pigment, swirling forms that suggest horses and warriors and ceremony, a palette of bold primaries and rich earth tones that gave his work an almost visceral physical presence. The paintings celebrate Crow culture without romanticizing or freezing it — they feel alive, in motion, filled with the energy of ceremony and the vitality of a living cultural tradition. Biss was deeply connected to the Crow Nation throughout his life, and his work reflects that connection with both pride and intimacy. He exhibited regularly in Taos, Santa Fe, and Scottsdale galleries and achieved significant prices at Western art auctions during his lifetime. His work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Heard Museum, and major private collections focused on Indigenous and Western American art. He is remembered as one of the most distinctive painterly voices in the history of Crow art.