Being biracial in the United States means that you are the perpetual outsider. Fritz Scholder, who blasted apart the stereotypes of Native American people and life circulating in the mass media and tourist art, experienced the dilemma of non-belonging. Born in Breckenridge, Minnesota, in 1937, his ancestry was largely German, but his paternal grandmother was from the Luiseño tribe of California Mission Indians. Because of her, Scholder was an enrolled member of the federally recognized La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians.
While Scholder described himself as a “non-Indian Indian,” and vowed to never paint a Native American person, he broke that vow at different points in his career. His refusal to conform to expectations and his rejection of limiting definitions of his identity as Native American are high watermarks in postwar American painting. He both acknowledged his biracial identity and reminded us of the country’s legacy of eradicating Indigenous people and culture.
Fritz Scholder: Paintings 1968–1980 at Garth Greenan Gallery, his debut exhibition at this gallery and first show in New York since his 2008–9 retrospective Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian at the National Museum of the American Indian, gives us plenty to ponder. The exhibition’s 15 paintings span 13 years, from “Indian with Blue Aura” (1967) to “Dream Indian” (1980). During this period, he was preoccupied with Native American history, and the aftereffects of America’s genocidal policies. This decade in Scholder’s career overlaps with the rise of Native American activism and the founding of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in Minneapolis in 1968, as well as the Vietnam War, in which Indigenous people comprised one out of every 65 soldiers who saw combat.
“Dying Indian” (1968) portrays a figure with a smashed, skull-like face, lying on his side atop a uniform black mound, lines of red paint dripping down his stomach. Above him is a narrow, curvilinear band of deep blue sky. Within this compressed, claustrophobic space, viewers confront an anguished, broken face looking back at them, his arms reaching both down and out, his fingers digging into the ground. This is a painting of human barbarity. Although it coincides with the founding of the AIM, I don’t think it is a stretch to connect the painting to the nightly news reports about the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.
Two years later, Scholder painted “Massacre at Wounded Knee I,” drawing on a well-known news photograph of Uŋpȟáŋ Glešká, a Lakota Sioux leader, who died there. The photograph shows a group of American soldiers behind him, in the distance; they appear unconcerned about the leader, whom an American nicknamed Big Foot. The photographer, Gus Trager, retrieved “souvenirs” from the dead, including the clothing of Uŋpȟáŋ Glešká and a medicine man.
The related painting, “Massacre in America: Wounded Knee” (1972) (not in the exhibition), is an even more brutal depiction of the massacre’s victims, depicting multiple casualties and their callous treatment at the hands of the US forces as a lone horse looks on. Scholder’s works are a searing visual indictment of the US government-sanctioned slaughter of an estimated 300 Lakota men, women, and children by the US 7th Cavalry Regiment, an event widely celebrated in the popular press at the time. By referring to news photographs, the artist reappropriated the cavalry’s grim celebrations of their “victory.”
Most riveting about this exhibition are the different subjects Scholder took on, and the subtly different ways he painted them, all underscoring his importance as an American artist and portraitist. His ambition to convey the complexity of Native American identity and the effects of modern, White society on Native American people and culture required different solutions for each painting, resulting in his broad stylistic range.
In the early painting, “Indian with Blue Aura,” Scholder gives us no context; it is a portrait of a Native American with a blue aura (halation line) edging his long flowing black hair. He is wearing a bone hairpipe (or buffalo horn) vest and a green shirt with black marks over it. Traditionally, this was worn as armor. What century does Scholder’s figure live in? Isn’t that part of the subject? Doesn’t the blue aura and blue marking on his face evoke a mystical experience? Scholder, who studied with Wayne Thiebaud, has transformed his mentor’s use of halation lines to suggest something very different. What about the black dots? Don’t they also convey the exalted state of the man in the portrait?
Other subjects include a Native American man in ceremonial regalia carrying an umbrella and a drunken man wearing a cowboy hat, reclining on the salmon-colored ground, with a light blue shadow extending from him. The color infuses the painting with visual incongruities, which reflect the artist’s understanding of his life in relation to concepts of Native American identity and life. He might have been inspired by Pop art, Expressionism, and Op art, but what he did with these stylistic possibilities is very much his own. What comes through in all of his portraits is a deep, jarring feeling of displacement — even within the context of a painting, Scholder realized he couldn’t give his subjects a home.
Fritz Scholder: Paintings 1968–1980 continues at Garth Greenan Gallery (545 West 20th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through August 9. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
