Fritz Scholder, Indian Rug #5

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0:00:05.6 Beth Harris: We’re standing in the storage room for some recently acquired works by the Art Bridges Foundation, and we’re standing in front of a really large painting by Fritz Scholder, Indian Rug Number Five. I probably would have recognized this as an Indian motif even before I read the title, because this is so well known.

0:00:25.3 Julia Mun: This is mimicking Navajo Germantown blankets, and specifically the eyedazzler design. In the 1860s, the Diné tribes were forcefully relocated to the Bosque Redondo reservations. And to survive these harsh climates, Diné women would weave blankets and needed yarn to do so. And so the soldiers supplied Germantown yarns. Germantown, in Pennsylvania, was particularly known for producing these commercially dyed yarns that replaced hand dyed Navajo or Diné weaver materials.

0:00:58.9 Beth Harris: But here we are decades later, and Fritz Scholder is remaking that rug and that pattern on a canvas at this moment when the art world is really interested in abstraction.

0:01:14.0 Julia Mun: Specifically in the 1970s, there were two major art shows that were happening during this time. One was the 1971 Whitney show called the Abstract Design in American Quilts. And in 1972, there was a tour of Navajo blankets from the collections of famous modernists such as Frank Stella, Donald Judd. And so Navajo blankets were certainly on Fritz Scholder’s mind just because Scholder was so conscious of what Native stereotypes and what Native romanticizations sold on the market. And Navajo blankets are, of course, a major commodity.

0:01:51.6 Beth Harris: So we’ve got this weaving, which is incredibly precise, recreated in paint. And weaving is such a time consuming, laborious process and has so much craft and precision, and we’re missing so much of that here.

0:02:09.7 Julia Mun: The lines are jagged, they feel loose. It’s very characteristic of Fritz Scholder’s loose brushwork. Some of the lines are disconnected, but it creates an overall dynamic energy that seems to vibrate and appear even more real.

0:02:27.8 Beth Harris: The brush is skipping, sometimes leaving some areas blank as he does the zigzag pattern. Or you can feel the way that the white paint has been diluted so that it’s semi transparent. And you can see those brushstrokes as though he’s kind of making fun of de Kooning and gestural painting. Or some areas where we see drips or clumps of paint, where I feel like he might be making fun of Jackson Pollock, this sort of participating and calling out irony at the same time.

0:02:56.9 Julia Mun: And what’s really remarkable about this painting is the edges have these jagged lines of red around the borders. It almost appears as if the blanket is still on the loom and in the process of creation. And it’s interesting because the red lines of the loom seem a little bit more solid, more precise, than the actual eyedazzler design itself.

0:03:19.9 Beth Harris: So much of what is going on in modernism in the first half of the 20th century has to do with this question of what is an authentic American art. That question gets answered by, well, it’s the art made by Native Americans that’s authentic American art. And what collectors want is the authentic, the true.

0:03:37.8 Julia Mun: And he really grew conscious of this idea of authenticity and what makes a real representation of the Indian during his time in Santa Fe, when he was an instructor at the Institute of American Indian Arts. During this time, he vowed that he would never paint a Native American. But starting in the late ’60s, he started his Indian series, where he’s portraying all these stereotypes of the Native American, but that was what sold in the market. And so, even though this is not necessarily a figural representation or a continuation of that series, he’s still contending with those issues of commodification and what sells.

0:04:21.8 Beth Harris: It seems that this is an attempt, in a way, to break that romantic stereotype of the Germantown eyedazzler rug.

0:04:29.5 Julia Mun: And I think he also does that by choosing to create the loom border. He is essentially centering it back into the hands of the Diné creator and centering it back into the community itself.

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This work at Art Bridges

Learn more about the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo from the National Museum of the American Indian

John Lukavic, Jessica Horton, Eric Berkemeyer, Kent Logan, et al., Super Indian: Fritz Scholder 1967–1980, exhibition catalogue (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2015).

Lowery Stokes Sims, editor, Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian, exhibition catalogue (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 2008).

Expression and modern art

Terms and issues in Native American art

Refugees, prisoners, and displacement during the Civil War