Fritz William Scholder V[1] (October 6, 1937 – February 10, 2005) was a Native American artist, who produced paintings, monotypes, lithographs, and sculptures.

Scholder's most influential works were post-modern in sensibility and somewhat Pop Art in execution as he sought to deconstruct the mythos of the American Indian.

[8][11][12] Thiebaud invited Scholder to join him, along with Greg Kondos and Peter Vandenberg in creating a cooperative gallery in Sacramento.

After receiving a John Hay Whitney Fellowship, Scholder moved to Tucson and became a graduate assistant in the University of Arizona fine arts department where he studied with Andrew Rush and Charles Littler.

In 1970 he was invited by the Tamarind Institute, a print studio which had relocated that year from Los Angeles to Albuquerque, to do their first major project in their new premises.

The success of the series with critics and the public alike also helped to establish Tamarind Institute as a leading centre for printmaking in the United States.

[citation needed] Scholder's work was explored in a series on American Indian artists for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS).

Other artists in the series included R. C. Gorman, Helen Hardin, Allan Houser, Charles Loloma, and Joseph Lonewolf.

In 1980, Scholder was guest artist at the Oklahoma Art Institute, which resulted in a PBS film documentary, American Portrait.

Scholder drew lithographs at Ediciones Poligrafa in Barcelona and was guest artist at ISOMATA, USC at Idyllwild, California and again at the Oklahoma Arts Institute.

A major monograph was published by Rizzoli International, and Scholder returned to Egypt at the invitation of famed archeologist Kent Weeks.

In October, 2001 a major exhibition of paintings and sculpture regarding death and skulls titled, Last Portraits, at the Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota, opened in Duluth.

In March 2002, Chiaroscuro Galleries in Scottsdale opened a major show titled Orchids and Other Flowers, Scholder's reaction to 9/11.

On August 25, 2009, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver announced that Scholder was one of 13 California Hall of Fame inductees.

Scholder's Future Clone sculpture was included in a scene in Darren Aronofsky's 2010 film Black Swan, in which it has been described as "chilling like a Baselitz painting, all devoured face and wings, an evil spectre".

Scholder's work was part of Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now (2019–20), a traveling exhibition organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art,[8] and of Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting (2019–21), a survey at the National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center in New York.