"I succumbed to a subject that I vowed I would never paint: the American Indian.", Fritz Scholder, Fritz Scholder: An American Portrait (PBS, 1982)
Fritz Scholder (October 6, 1937 – February 10, 2005) was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor of Luiseño ancestry, and one of the most consequential figures in Native American art of the late twentieth century. Born in Breckenridge, Minnesota, an enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, he was raised in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin before his family moved to Sacramento, California, in 1957. He studied at Sacramento State University under Wayne Thiebaud, who introduced him to Abstract Expressionism and the emerging Pop Art idiom that would later inform his most influential work, and completed his MFA in 1964.
That same year he joined the faculty of the newly founded Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe as instructor in advanced painting and contemporary art history. In 1967, having previously vowed never to paint Native American subjects, he began the Indian Series that would occupy him for the next thirteen years and reshape the terms on which Native American art was made and seen. His work is held in essentially every major American collection of postwar and Native American art, including the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the Heard Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Eiteljorg Museum, and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.