Fritz Scholder

Fritz Scholder (1937–2005) was a Luiseño artist who radically and permanently challenged the conventions of what Native American art was supposed to look like, and in doing so helped create an entirely new tradition. Born in Breckenridge, Minnesota, to a father of mixed German and Luiseño heritage, Scholder spent his career navigating the complicated terrain between mainstream American art and the expectations placed on Indigenous artists - expectations he found confining and often patronizing. He studied under Wayne Thiebaud at Sacramento State College, where he absorbed the lessons of Bay Area Figurative painting and Pop Art, and later joined the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. It was there, beginning in the mid-1960s, that he began making the paintings that would define his career: large, expressionistic canvases depicting Indigenous Americans in ways that broke sharply from both romanticized tradition and assimilationist art. His figures drink beer, watch television, wear sunglasses, occupy motels - they exist in the contemporary world, not in a timeless ethnographic past. The work was confrontational, funny, and technically brilliant, and it caused significant controversy alongside significant acclaim. Scholder always complicated the question of his own identity - he sometimes insisted he was not "an Indian artist" while also clearly drawing on his cultural inheritance - and this refusal of easy categorization was itself part of his argument. He wanted his work to be judged by the standards of contemporary painting, not sorted into a separate category where different (and implicitly lower) standards would apply. His influence on subsequent generations of Indigenous artists has been enormous, matched perhaps only by that of his colleague T.C. Cannon, who studied under him at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His work is held in the Smithsonian, the Heard Museum, and major collections across the country. He maintained studios in Scottsdale and Taos throughout his career.