Fritz Scholder
Painted Indians with beer cans and umbrellas, and was attacked from every direction for it.
Fritz Scholder was born in Minnesota in 1937, one-quarter Luiseno and enrolled in the tribe, and taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe having sworn he would never paint Indians. He broke that promise in 1967 and produced the series that changed the field: Native subjects painted in the manner of Bacon and Wayne Thiebaud, wearing sunglasses, holding ice creams and beer cans, wrapped in the American flag — attacked by traditionalists for degrading the subject and by others for exploiting it, and now understood as the moment contemporary Native American painting began. He died in 2005.
An American market centred on the Southwest, with strong institutional interest. The Indian series of 1967 to 1980 leads by a wide margin over the later work, which is a broad field. Scholder was also a very prolific printmaker in lithography, working with Tamarind and others across three decades in editions typically of fifty to two hundred, and those prints are plentiful and are what most owners hold. The paintings use thin acrylic and oil on canvas with matt passages that mark easily. The Scholder estate holds the archive.
If you own a work by Fritz Scholder
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