Fritz Scholder (1937 – 2005) was a Luiseño painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose provocative reimagining of Native American identity transformed the course of contemporary Indigenous art and established him as one of the most significant American artists of the twentieth century.Fritz Scholder was born in Breckenridge, Minnesota, and was of Luiseño Mission Indian and European heritage. He earned an MFA from the University of Arizona in 1964 and joined the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, where he taught from 1964 to 1969. It was during this period that he began developing the body of work that would make him famous, a sustained series of paintings that confronted romantic and stereotypical imagery of Native Americans with a force and originality that the art world had not seen before. Early in his career he received grants from the Rockefeller, Whitney, and Ford Foundations, recognition that confirmed the significance of what he was doing.Scholder's Art StyleScholder's paintings draw on Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, and Pop Art, combining high contrast color, blunt iconography, and a critical intelligence that never allowed his work to settle into comfort or convention. He broke decisively with the romantic cliches of Native genre imagery, producing pictures that were at once deeply personal and broadly political. Working frequently in series, he also extended his practice into lithography, etching, monotype, and sculpture, approaching each medium with the same restless ambition that defined his painting.The Influence of Fritz ScholderThe impact of Scholder's work extended far beyond his own canvases. As a teacher at the Institute of American Indian Arts, he encouraged a generation of Indigenous artists, including T.C. Cannon and Earl Biss, to develop their own visual language free from the expectations placed on Native American art. In 1972, the Smithsonian Institution honored Scholder and Cannon with a landmark two-man show in Washington D.C., cementing both artists' place in the national conversation about art and identity.LegacyScholder's international reputation grew steadily throughout his career, with exhibitions in Japan, France, China, Germany, and at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Several books have been published on his work and he has been the subject of two documentary films. In 2008, three years after his death, the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian mounted a major career retrospective in New York and Washington D.C. Interest in his work has continued to grow ever since, and his paintings and prints remain among the most sought after in the secondary market for contemporary Native American art.