The Denver Art Museum recently announced the full slate of museum additions that were acquired in 2024, with several notable Western works on the list.
Among the highlights are a beaded canvas by Kiowa artist Teri Greeves; Billy Schenck’s 1984 half-tone dot painting Half-Tone Flats; a remarkable 1930 New Mexico woodblock print from Jessie Jo Eckford; and a provocative allegorical painting from Cree painter Kent Monkman.
Fritz Scholder (Luiseño), Deco Indian, 1978, oil paint on canvas, 80 x 68 in. Denver Art Museum: Gift of Stanley Asrael, in memory of his wife, Evelyn. 2023.539.
Another key addition to the museum’s vast and important collection is Fritz Scholder’s Deco Indian from 1978. The piece, a modern portrait-like painting of a seated Native American man, is a quintessential Scholder work with bold colors, a stylized figure and his solid-color background. Pieces like Deco Indian are helping establish Scholder’s work well beyond the Western and Native American genres from where they originated. Today these works are joining modern collections at the highest levels, with the prices to back them up.
“The [Native arts] department…was gifted Fritz Scholder’s Deco Indian. Among the foremost Indigenous contemporary artists of his time, the Luiseño artist broke new ground and influenced subsequent generations of artists,” the museum notes. “While Scholder’s reverse-image lithograph based on this painting is known widely, the original painting had been in a private collection since the 1970s, unseen by the public.”
For more information about the Denver Art Museum, visit the website at www.denverartmuseum.org. —
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