ppt of larsen gallery

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 Scholder’s 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.