Original Artworks of Fritz Scholder

1
(No Transcript)
2
A prolific painter, sculptor, lithographer, and
draftsman, Fritz Scholder is widely recognized as
the most divisive and decorated Native American
artist of the 20th century.  Over the course of a
decades-long career, Scholder developed an
inimitable style by combining techniques of
figurative, expressionist, color field, and
pop-art painting.  Scholder left an expansive,
urgent body of work that challenges prevailing
notions of representation, identity, history, and
the role of fine art.
3
In 1937, Fritz William Scholder V was born in
Breckenridge Minnesota.  Although he was an
enrolled member of the Luiseno tribe and an
instructor at the Institute of American Indian
Arts in Santa Fe, Scholder often said that he was
not Indian.  This paradoxical, ambivalent
relationship to associative identity
characterizes much of Scholders best-recognized
work.  In 1957, Scholder moved to California
where he studied with Wayne Thiebaud at
Sacramento State University. 
4
 In 1967, Scholder began his most famous series
of paintings vivid, large-scale portraits
depicting the real Indian which rejected
cliché, nostalgia, and the romanticism of Western
genre painting.  Fundamentally postmodern, these
paintings sought to deconstruct of the myth of
the American Indian and interrogate the material
and cultural circumstances of contemporary Native
American life.  
5
(No Transcript)