Fritz Scholder

Fritz William Scholder V (October 6, 1937 – February 10, 2005) was a Native American artist.

Scholder was an enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseno Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Luiseños, a California Mission tribe.

Scholder's most influential works were post-modern in sensibility and somewhat Pop Art in execution as he sought to deconstruct the mythos of the American Indian.

Fritz Scholder was born October 6, 1937, in Breckenridge, Minnesota.

As a high school student at Pierre, South Dakota, his art teacher was Oscar Howe, a noted Yanktonai Dakota artist.

In the summer of 1955, Scholder attended the Mid-West Art and Music Camp at the University of Kansas.

He studied with Robert B. Green at Lawrence, Kansas.

In 1956, Scholder graduated from Ashland High School in Wisconsin and took his freshman year at Wisconsin State University in Superior, where he studied with Arthur Kruk, James Grittner, and Michael Gorski.

In 1957, Scholder moved with his family to Sacramento, California, where he studied with Wayne Thiebaud.

Thiebaud invited Scholder to join him, along with Greg Kondos and Peter Vandenberg in creating a cooperative gallery in Sacramento.

Scholder's first show received an exceptional review.

Scholder's next one-man exhibition was at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento.

His work was being shown throughout the region, including the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

A teacher at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe in the late 1960s, Scholder instructed prominent Native American students.

Upon graduation from Sacramento State University, where he studied with Tarmo Pasto and Raymond Witt, Scholder was invited to participate in the Rockefeller Indian Art Project at the University of Arizona in 1961.

He met Cherokee Nation fashion designer Lloyd Kiva New and studied with Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma.

After receiving a John Hay Whitney Fellowship, Scholder moved to Tucson and became a graduate assistant in the University of Arizona fine arts department where he studied with Andrew Rush and Charles Littler.

There, he met artists Max Cole, John Heric and Bruce McGrew.

After graduating with a MFA degree in 1964, Scholder accepted the position of instructor in advanced painting and contemporary art history at the newly formed Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Scholder has always worked in series of paintings.

In 1967, his new series on the Native American, depicting the "real Indian," became an immediate controversy.

Scholder painted Indians with American flags, beer cans, and cats.

His target was the loaded national cliché and guilt of the dominant culture.

His portraits have been described as drawing out "the psychic cost of the gap between romantic and backward-looking popular stereotypes of Indians and the actualities of their daily lives" and as often employing "a sardonic humour in their revelations of the absurdities of Native people's lives in the twentieth-century world".

Scholder did not grow up as an Indian and his unique perspective could not be denied.

Scholder resigned from IAIA in 1969 and traveled to Europe and North Africa.

He returned to Santa Fe and acquired a small adobe house and studio on Canyon Road.

In 1970 he was invited by the Tamarind Institute, a print studio which had relocated that year from Los Angeles to Albuquerque, to do their first major project in their new premises.

The collaboration resulted in the suite of seven lithographs Indians Forever, where the artist articulates more consciously the image of the modern Indian and which introduced him to the medium of lithography.

The success of the series with critics and the public alike also helped to establish Tamarind Institute as a leading centre for printmaking in the United States.

Scholder/Indians was published by Northland Press, the first book on Scholder's work.

In the same year, Scholder had his first one-man show at the Lee Nordness Galleries.

He had become a major influence for a generation of Native American artists.

He was invited to lecture at numerous art conferences and universities including Princeton and Dartmouth.

In 1972 an exhibition of the Dartmouth Portraits opened at Cordier and Ekstrom in New York to favorable reviews.

In the same year, Adelyn D. Breeskin of the Smithsonian American Art Museum visited Scholder and suggested a two-person show of the work of Scholder and one of his former students.

Scholder chose T. C. Cannon.

The show opened in Washington, D.C. to good reviews and traveled to Romania, Yugoslavia, Berlin, and London.

Scholder was invited to have a one-man show at the Basil V International Art Fair in Switzerland in 1974.

After Basel, Scholder traveled to Egypt and painted the sphinx and pyramids.