The exhibit with works of the influential Indian artist, Fritz Scholder: An Intimate Look, is running from July 19, 2008 - February 15, 2009 at the IAIA Museum in Santa Fe featuring art from Scholder's personal archives. Scholder was an art professor at Santa Fe's IAIA school and influential in the new direction of modern Indian art. The exhibit is one of the best I've seen at that museum.
When we were moving to NYC, the National Museum of the American Indian had just opened in WDC so I stopped in and was disappointed because it was based on the personal collection of George Gustav Heye with a mission to show Indian works from this hemisphere. The Southwest area where so much is happening in Indian Arts, got scant coverage. So I'm glad to see Scholder get on the national stage just three years after his death. I saw relics in the Gustav Heye museum in NYC in the old Customs House near Wall Street but it didn't have art of the 20th century.
Scholder, a Native American/Indian abstract artist (1937-2005) who worked in multiple mediums, will be the subject this fall of a major retrospective at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. and the Gustave Heye Center in New York City. He was considered a leader of the New American Indian Art movement. Scholder didn't consider himself to be an Indian though he was one-quarter Luiseno California Mission tribe and he was raised in a predominately German family.
With a Master's of Fine Arts degree, he was quite prolific. From 1964 to 1969 he taught painting and art history at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico and in 1969 he had a studio on Santa Fe's famed Canyon Road. He worked to represent the landscape and people of the Southwest without into the clichés of genre art on the Native themes. His style was a fusion of abstract expressionism, surrealism and pop art. His reputation was on an international level and these NYC and WDC exhibits will remind the world, once again, of a huge force in modern Indian art.
His posters helped his works gain wide circulation, like this Santa Fe Opera poster at left, from 1980.
Early in his career, he received support from the Rockefeller, Whitney and Ford Foundations. After five years in Santa Fe, he retired from teaching to paint full-time. He's been dead for just three years.
So I'll be checking it out...
Scholder is right up my alley. I wish I could get to Santa Fe & see the exhibit.
Posted by: Hattie | July 29, 2008 at 11:40 AM