Fritz William Scholder V

Fritz William Scholder V was an expressionist painter and sculptor whose “Indian” series of paintings in the 1960s and 1970s fundamentally reimagined the artistic depiction of Native Americans. Born in Minnesota to a family of German and Native American ancestry, Scholder was an enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, a California Mission tribe. 

He was educated at Sacramento State College (B.A., 1960), where he studied with Wayne Thiebaud, who arranged for his first one-man show, and the University of Arizona (M.F.A., 1964). As a child he was fascinated by foreign cultures, especially ancient Egypt. Scholder traveled to Egypt and Transylvania, among other places, accumulating artifacts and occult objects that figured prominently as props in his work. 

In the late 1960s, Scholder taught advanced painting and contemporary art history at the newly formed Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. In 1967, while teaching at the Institute, he began his “Indian” series. His innovative approach, based on research and observation, was a radical departure from traditional, sentimental renderings of mythic Indians. He was believed to be the first artist to paint an Indian wrapped in an American flag, based on nineteenth-century prison photographs of Indians dressed in surplus flags. 

In 1970, the Tamarind Institute, a print studio in Albuquerque, invited him to do a major project that resulted in a suite of seven lithographs, “Indians Forever,” that articulated the image of the modern Indian and introduced Scholder to the medium of lithography. The success of the series helped to establish the Tamarind Institute as a leading center for printmaking. 

The first book on Scholder’s work, Scholder/Indians, was published by Northland Press. Although best known for his paintings, Scholder produced work in a variety of media: lithographs, photographs, sculpture, and books. His work is in dozens of museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 

In 1983, Scholder received the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. Scholder was named lifetime Sociétaire of the Salon d’Automne and exhibited at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1984. The following year, he was honored with the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement.

Screaming Artist, 1971, Lithograph -- Self-portrait by Fritz Scholder.