Scholder's career stands as the hinge between two periods in Native American art, the older idiom of decorative, ethnographic, and explicitly tribal painting, and the contemporary practice in which Native artists work as full participants in international modernism, and his Indian Series is the body of work that turned the hinge.
Scholder's path to art began in the upper Midwest, where he grew up in a household conscious of his quarter-Luiseño ancestry but largely outside the tribal world of his California grandmother's people. His decision to pursue art seriously came in high school, and the family's move west brought him into contact with one of the most important American art teachers of the postwar period. Wayne Thiebaud, then beginning his own career as a painter, gave Scholder a thorough grounding in postwar American practice and pushed him toward the painterly handling and pop subject matter that would underlie his mature style.
His move to Santa Fe to teach at the IAIA placed him at the centre of the early efforts to build a national institution for the training of Native American artists. The school had been founded in 1962 to bring together students from across the tribes and to give them both technical skills and an environment in which contemporary art was taken seriously, and Scholder, non-tribal in upbringing, non-Native in artistic training, but Luiseño by ancestry, became one of the school's most influential teachers. His students included T. C. Cannon and an entire cohort of artists who would shape Native American art into the next century.
The breakthrough came when, against his own stated commitments, he began painting Native American subjects. The Indian Series took the loaded national imagery of the "Indian", feathered headdresses, wrapped blankets, the silent ceremonial figure, and combined it with the visual vocabulary of contemporary Pop and Bay Area Figurative painting. He painted Indians holding beer cans, wrapped in American flags, sitting with cats, smoking cigarettes; he painted them in colors that owed more to Francis Bacon and David Park than to any conventional Western art. The work was widely controversial within both Native and non-Native audiences, attacked as a betrayal of authentic Native imagery and praised as a long-overdue intervention against the mythic, sanitized "Indian" of the dominant culture.
He resigned from IAIA in 1969 and travelled to Europe and North Africa, broadening the visual sources of his work and confirming the international ambitions of his practice. He continued the Indian Series until 1980, when he closed it with the explanation that he had finished what he had to say about Indians, and turned to other subjects, figures, mysteries, deserts, deities, dogs, vampires, for the rest of his career.
His influence has continued to grow in the decades since his death. His work is now read both as a foundational moment in the contemporary Native American art movement and as a serious engagement with American Pop, Bay Area figuration, and European Expressionism that stands on its own terms within the wider history of late twentieth-century painting. The body of work, the teaching, and the deliberate refusal of any single category of identity have together made him one of the most important figures of his generation.