Why he matters
Walk the Western galleries on Main Street and you will see two kinds of Indian picture. One is the old romantic kind, a noble figure on a horse at sunset. The other is loud, smeared, sometimes funny and sometimes frightening, a man in a headdress holding a beer can. The second kind exists largely because of Fritz Scholder, who started painting it in 1967 and turned the image of the American Indian into an argument.
He spent his last years in Scottsdale, in a house on Cattle Track Road that was as famous as some of his canvases, and the city’s galleries sold him steadily for decades. His career ran through Santa Fe and New York, but Scottsdale is where it ended.
Where to find his mark today
Cattle Track Arts Compound. Scholder lived across the road. The compound is the best way to understand the neighborhood of working artists he chose.
Scottsdale ArtWalk. Thursday nights in Old Town, where the galleries that handled his prints still trade in them.
The neighbor across the road
Cattle Track Road in central Scottsdale was already an artists’ lane by the time Scholder made his home there. George and Rachael Ellis had turned their canal-side homestead into a colony, and Philip C. Curtis had painted there since 1948. Scholder’s house brought a different energy: a rhinoceros head in the living room, a mummified cat, a stuffed buffalo for a headboard, and the obelisk out front.
He had crossed paths with Scottsdale’s earlier Native design scene too. As a young painter he met Lloyd Kiva New and studied with the Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma, both veterans of the Kiva Craft Center on Fifth Avenue.
The full story
Fritz Scholder was born in 1937 in Breckenridge, Minnesota, and grew up in the upper Midwest. His mother was Luiseño, and he was an enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, but he did not grow up on a reservation and when pigeonholed he would complain that he had as much right to be called a German artist. He studied under Wayne Thiebaud in Sacramento, met Lloyd Kiva New and Charles Loloma, and took an MFA at the University of Arizona in 1964.
That year he began teaching at New’s Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. In 1967 he started the series that made his name: Native figures painted with American flags, beer cans and cats, in loose, brash paint with a Pop Art edge. It was an attack on the national cliché and on the “traditional” style then expected of Native artists, and it made him famous. By the 1970s his work was in Washington museums, and the 1980s chapter records Old Town storefronts selling Scholder beside bronzes and bolo ties.
He lived and worked in Santa Fe and, from 1982, a Manhattan loft, but kept a winter home in Scottsdale on Cattle Track Road, and in the end it became his only home. He returned to Arizona in 1994 and set up a private press, Apocrypha. In 1995 the Scottsdale Center for the Arts, which had opened in 1975, gave him a year-long exhibition, and Chiaroscuro Gallery in Scottsdale showed his late work, including “Orchids and Other Flowers” in 2002 and his last show, “Muses,” in 2003. His late subjects were skulls, winged figures and death, an interest in the dark side that friends said never made him gloomy.
He died in Scottsdale in 2005, after a long illness, and was remembered at the Heard Museum. In 2008 the National Museum of the American Indian opened a retrospective in two cities under the title he might have chosen himself: Indian/Not Indian. The wider period is in the resort-metropolis era.