Diversity of brilliance spotlights many crucial dimensions of Fritz Scholder’s prolific career illustrating his protean artistic brilliance. These works are deeply personal; even autobiographical. These major paintings and works on paper delve beyond appearances towards deeper mysteries of the psyche, with series that range from subtle, dream-like works to mysterious, phantasmagoric figures and shamanic spiritual archetypes, each revealing a new facet of Scholder’s rich and complicated inner world.

A leading figure in American art history, Scholder is known for his groundbreaking reinvention of the way Native Americans are portrayed in contemporary art. With a career that began in the mid-1960s, Scholder became famous for his groundbreaking paintings of the contemporary reality of indigenous people. But starting in 1982 until his death in 2005, Scholder also focused increasingly on more far-reaching subjects including dreams, spirituality and mythic subjects that acted increasingly as personal meditations on identity, fame, love, sexuality, and mortality, although he also returned to Indian subjects as well.

In the words of Pulitzer Prize winning indigenous writer N. Scott Momaday, “Scholder did not lift the spirits, he awoke them.”