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In the 1960s, as Western art was becoming more traditional in the face of modern art, Fritz Scholder was exploring what it meant to live in the West as a Native American, even as the Luiseño artist had barely identified as a Native American. The work he made transcended what Indigenous art could be, and it created a new modern movement within Western art that persists today. Born in Missouri, Scholder bounced around the Midwest with his family until they settled in Sacramento, California. There, at Sacramento State University, he was urged to explore Pop Art by Wayne Thiebaud, who helped the young artist get his first solo show.

Starting in 1964, Scholder taught for five years at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Frustrated with what he wanted to paint, Scholder quit AIAI and traveled in Europe and Africa. In 1970, he returned to Santa Fe with several new skills—mixed media, sculpture, lithography, etchings and monotypes—and a renewed sense for what he wanted to create. The work completed in his studio spoke to his complicated Native American identity, the way Native people are viewed in American culture and life in the desert Southwest. He painted vast fields of color in solid hues, broken and fragmented figures, stylized depictions of wildlife and sacred ceremonies seen through a lens of abstract expressionism. More akin to Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko and Pablo Picasso than any Western artist, Scholder helped usher in a new age of modern art in the Southwest.

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