30 Facts About Fritz Scholder

Fritz William Scholder V was a Native American artist, who produced paintings, monotypes, lithographs, and sculptures.

Fritz Scholder was born October 6,1937, in Breckenridge, Minnesota.

Fritz Scholder studied with Robert B Green at Lawrence, Kansas.

In 1956, Fritz Scholder graduated from Ashland High School in Wisconsin and took his freshman year at Wisconsin State University in Superior, where he studied with Arthur Kruk, James Grittner, and Michael Gorski.

In 1957, Fritz Scholder moved with his family to Sacramento, California, where he studied with Wayne Thiebaud.

Thiebaud invited Fritz Scholder to join him, along with Greg Kondos and Peter Vandenberg in creating a cooperative gallery in Sacramento.

Fritz Scholder's work was being shown throughout the region, including the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

Fritz Scholder met Cherokee Nation fashion designer Lloyd Kiva New and studied with Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma.

Fritz Scholder painted Indians with American flags, beer cans, and cats.

Fritz Scholder's target was the loaded national cliche and guilt of the dominant culture.

Fritz Scholder's portraits have been described as drawing out "the psychic cost of the gap between romantic and backward-looking popular stereotypes of Indians and the actualities of their daily lives" and as often employing "a sardonic humour in their revelations of the absurdities of Native people's lives in the twentieth-century world".

Fritz Scholder did not grow up as an Indian and his unique perspective could not be denied.

Fritz Scholder resigned from IAIA in 1969 and traveled to Europe and North Africa.

Fritz Scholder returned to Santa Fe and acquired a small adobe house and studio on Canyon Road.

Fritz Scholder had become a major influence for a generation of Native American artists.

Fritz Scholder was invited to lecture at numerous art conferences and universities including Princeton and Dartmouth.

Fritz Scholder was invited to have a one-man show at the Basil V International Art Fair in Switzerland in 1974.

In 1975, Fritz Scholder did his first etchings at El Dorado Press in Berkeley, California.

Fritz Scholder's work was explored in a series on American Indian artists for the Public Broadcasting System.

In 1980, Fritz Scholder was guest artist at the Oklahoma Art Institute, which resulted in a PBS film documentary, American Portrait.

Fritz Scholder drew lithographs at Ediciones Poligrafa in Barcelona and was guest artist at ISOMATA, USC at Idyllwild, California and again at the Oklahoma Arts Institute.

In 1983, Fritz Scholder received a New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts.

Fritz Scholder was named lifetime Societaire of the Salon d'Automne and exhibited at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1984.

In 1994, Leonard Baskin invited Fritz Scholder to collaborate on a major book at Gehenna Press in Massachusetts.

Fritz Scholder then retreated to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire.

Fritz Scholder began the Millenium series and worked in London, Paris and Budapest.

In 1999 Fritz Scholder completed Future Clone, an eight-foot-tall bronze sculpture, described by ArtDaily as "androgynous angel figure" which exhibits "the same agitated, textural touch" that Fritz Scholder brought to his paintings.

Fritz Scholder produced his first digital book, Thoughts at Night, in 2000.

Fritz Scholder's work was then featured at The California Museum's exhibition of the work and contributions of that year's Hall of Fame laureates.

Fritz Scholder's work was part of Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now, a traveling exhibition organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and of Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting, a survey at the National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center in New York.