Fritz Scholder, Dartmouth Portrait

[00:00:05]We're standing in the storage room that contains works in the collection of the Art Bridges Foundation, and we're standing in front of a large painting by Fritz Scholder, Dartmouth portrait number 15.

[00:00:18]>> It comes from a series during Fritz Scholder's residency at Dartmouth College. Dartmouth was founded by Eleazar Wheelock, the Christian minister. One of his students, Samson Occom, was a Mohegan and converted to Christianity, then was ordained as a minister. He became a really prominent educator who advocated for Mohegan and Montauk tribes. Wheelock wanted to continue this work and founded the Moor's Indian Charity School to educate and convert Native children. Occom was sent to England to fundraise for the school. However, Wheelock used this money to relocate Moor's Indian Charity School to another college, now known as Dartmouth College. From 1769 to 1970, Dartmouth only graduated 20 Native students, completely straying away from the original purpose of the Moor's Indian Charity School.

[00:01:13]>> Inviting Fritz Scholder to Dartmouth was part of a reparative effort toward Native Americans on the part of Dartmouth College. And so, Scholder goes there. He's got a 1-year residency and produces this series of Indians written large.

[00:01:30]>> And this comes after a time when Fritz Scholder started teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

[00:01:36]Scholder said that he would never paint an Indian, but there was a turning point where Scholder becomes very conscious of popular culture and what sells in the market, which is the romanticized idea of the Indian. So, despite saying this, he started painting the Indian and it became a continued legacy throughout his career including at Dartmouth.

[00:01:59]>> When his Indian series was first painted, people were not happy to see his large images of Native Americans in regalia holding a cat or eating an ice cream cone. Images that place Native Americans in the modern world when it was so important in American thinking for Native Americans to be in the past.

[00:02:23]>> And I think color plays a large part leaning into the color of red and its association to Native Americans.

[00:02:30]>> Well, and I think it's the color that makes this so modern. This weird green that forms the background and then this deeper brassy green that makes up his clothing. The touches of purple, the touches of red, the bright yellow in the nose and the mouth. These are colors that I wouldn't expect to go together.

[00:02:51]>> So, there's so many contradictory elements. There's the thinner wash of paint versus the thick white layers, this bright red with a muted green. They all seem very contradictory to each other. And the outline of the entire figure is this slight pink purple. We can see it clearly more on the lips, the corners of the eyes, the eyelids, and in his hair parting. It creates almost a halo effect in a way or it makes the figure vibrate even in such a static space.

[00:03:26]>> I think it's hard to overstate Shoulder's contribution to moving Native art forward, freeing Native artists to be themselves.

[00:03:39]>> And so many students were influenced by Fritz Scholder. We have T.C. Cannon, all these prominent Native American artists who are looking to Shoulder's vocabulary and visual techniques. You can almost feel the brush strokes of the darkness in the hair. We can see where his brush kind of runs out of paint around the edges of the figure. We have a sense of this being very quickly and spontaneously painted, and that could remind us of the action painters of the 1950s, of someone like Willem de Kooning. But, we also have a kind of pop art sensibility here in the way that the figure is isolated against the background.

[00:04:17]>> And that's interesting because pop art appropriated popular mass images. And so, if we're thinking about how Shulder is so cognizant of the romanticized idea or the stereotype of the Indian, then in a way he's appropriating that image here in Dartmouth portrait number 15 and using scale, technique, color, he's bringing this romanticized idea back into the forefront. And I think what's also interesting about this work, though this is speculative, the long hair is so reminiscent of images of Samson Occom.

[00:04:54]>> If this is a historic figure, if this is Occom, there's a kind of tragedy here because we know that Occom's vision for Native American education was undermined.

[00:05:05]>> But, still an important presence in this longer history of such a storied institution.

[00:05:12]>> [music]