“Untitled” (America) | Art & Artists

Fritz Scholder once remarked that “the essence of paint is color” and that “color is very personal.” The evocative juxtaposition of deep reds and stark white in this painting alludes to the tragic history of the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, when United States Army troops, responding to perceived Indigenous resistance in South Dakota, killed nearly three hundred Lakota people. Scholder, an enrolled member of the Luiseño tribe, worked from photographic documentation of the event but does not offer a literal representation of it. Rather, his vigorous brushstrokes and abstract composition convey a visceral sense of the violence—a landscape haunted by trauma based in the enduring legacy of colonial oppression against Indigenous people in America.