Fritz Scholder, Massacre at Wounded Knee II, 1970

Laura Phipps: I'm Laura Phipps, associate Curator at the Whitney Museum. 

Massacre at Wounded Knee is really Fritz Scholder’s interpretation based on documentary photography of the massacre at Wounded Knee that occurred in South Dakota in 1890. 

Narrator: This was the climax of the U.S. Army's late 19th century efforts to repress the Plains Indians. 

Fritz Scholder was an enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of the Luiseno Indians, which is in present day California. He's also of German descent. And he had a really ambivalent and ultimately sort of complicated relationship to his own Indigeneity, and in fact really sort of pushed against ideas that he would in his own work sort of depict Native American culture or identity for many, many years. Was really interested in abstraction, in color. really referred to himself as a colorist above all else.

Starting in the late 1960s, Scholder is really more interested in becoming preoccupied with Native American history. And so he's looking at moments in history that have this specific relationship to his own understanding of Native American culture and tying them sort of back to this present moment. So his approach to the Battle of Wounded Knee is this real abstraction of this moment of violence that in his mind is related to the contemporary moment of violence that he was experiencing in 1970.