Fritz Scholder
Born in Breckenridge, Minnesota, Scholder was one-quarter Luiseño, 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. A teacher at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in the late 1960s, Scholder influenced a generation of Native American students.
Scholder knew what he had to do at an early age. As a high school student at Pierre, South Dakota, his teacher was Oscar Howe, a noted Yankton 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. 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, with other artists, creating a cooperative gallery in Sacramento.
He met Cherokee 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 Fine Arts Department where he studied with Andrew Rush and Charles Littler. After graduating with an 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 was invited by Tamarind to do the first major project, a suite of lithographs, Indians Forever. It was the beginning of a large body of work in that medium for the artist. He had become a major influence for a generation of Native American artists. In 1975, Scholder did his first etchings at El Dorado Press in Berkeley, California. Scholder's work was explored in a series on American Indian artists for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). Also in 1975, a book of his lithographs was released by New York Graphic Society. Scholder discovered monotypes in 1977. His first exhibition of photographs was shown at the Heard Museum in 1978. In 1980, Scholder was guest artist at the Oklahoma Art Institute, which resulted in a PBS film documentary, American Portrait. In 1994, Leonard Baskin invited Scholder to collaborate on a major book at Gehenna Press in Massachusetts. Scholder returned to Arizona and established his private press. He then retreated to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. The following year, two major shows opened, The Private Work of Fritz Scholder at the Phoenix Art Museum and a year-long exhibition, Fritz Scholder/Icons and Apparitions, at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts in Arizona. Scholder began the Millenium series and worked in London, Paris and Budapest.
