Earl Biss (1947 – 1998) was an Apsáalooke (Crow) painter whose luminous, color-saturated canvases brought the landscape, figures, and spiritual energy of Plains Indian culture into dialogue with the most vital currents of twentieth century Western art.Earl Biss grew up on the Crow Reservation and began his formal training in art at age sixteen at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, where he studied under Fritz Scholder and was exposed to the ideas and techniques of Abstract Expressionism. He later attended the San Francisco Art Institute on scholarship, and his studies took him to Europe as well, where he engaged with the work of the Old Masters and the European modernists who would become lasting influences on his practice.Biss and the IAIA GenerationBiss was part of the remarkable generation of Native American artists who came through the Institute of American Indian Arts in the 1960s, a group that included T.C. Cannon and Kevin Red Star, and whose collective work transformed the landscape of contemporary Indigenous art. Unlike the Abstract Expressionists who preceded him, Biss described his paintings as springing from ideas rather than from the process of painting itself. His signature canvases combine mystical landscapes and Plains Indian figures with a feeling for the work of European masters such as William Turner and Edvard Munch, as well as the Fauves and the New York School painters Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. The invisible energy contained in nature was perhaps his greatest subject, and he translated that force into abstraction with a technique that embodied fluid movement, layering, and continuous rhythm.The Art of Earl BissBiss worked primarily in oil, building surfaces of extraordinary richness and chromatic intensity that reward sustained looking. He was most powerful, by his own account, when dealing with subjects about which he felt deeply and knew more intimately than the theories behind experimental art originating in New York and Europe. That authenticity of feeling gives his paintings an emotional directness that sets them apart from purely formal abstraction and connects them unmistakably to the cultural world from which they emerged.LegacyEarl Biss died in 1998 at the age of fifty. His works are held in collections nationally, including the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, described by the New York Times as among the nation's most remarkable museums. His prints and paintings remain among the most actively collected works in the secondary market for contemporary Native American and Southwest art.