"In case Thanksgiving left you with any guilt towards the plight of the Indian population, a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian’s Fritz Scholder exhibit will ease your pain.

Titled "Indian/Not Indian", the exhibition is a retrospective of Scholder’s remarkable forty-year career and features 135 paintings, works on paper and sculptures. In the 1960s and 1970s,

Scholder, who died in 2005, completed a series depicting “real Indians”. The paintings were the source of immediate controversy as they showed Native Americans not in their “natural habitat”, but with beer cans and American flags and domesticated animals. His goal was to represent American clichés and guilt.

Scholder was the son of a Bureau of Indian Affiairs administrator and grew up in the Northern Plains of Minnesota, but he did not consider himself a Native American, due to his mixed heritage. “Although one-quarter Luiseño (a California mission tribe), Scholder always insisted he was not American Indian any more than he was German or French, yet he became the most successful and highly regarded painter of Native Americans in U.S. history—a fact that raises the question of what ‘Indian art’ actually is,” said Truman Lowe, curator of contemporary art at the museum.

Despite a career that spanned five decades, Scholder was known as a recluse, which may be the reason for him not receiving the attention he deserves. This is the first major exhibit of his work since his death, but it cements his stature in the genre of Native art."

Get the Story:
Fritz Holder exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian (The DC Examiner 12/3)

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