SANTA FE, NM. - Windsor Betts Art Brokerage, a specialist gallery and brokerage house in downtown Santa Fe, reports sustained and growing collector interest in works by the artists who defined the contemporary Native American and Southwest art movement. The gallery, which has operated from 217 Galisteo Street for 38 years, facilitates the acquisition and sale of important works by artists including Fritz Scholder, T.C. Cannon, Allan Houser, Kevin Red Star, Earl Biss, John Nieto, Tony Abeyta, Dan Namingha, and Doug Hyde.

Unlike conventional galleries that represent artists directly, Windsor Betts operates as an intermediary between buyers and sellers, sourcing works from private collections and estates. The brokerage model offers collectors access to vetted works that do not appear at conventional galleries or public auction, along with personalized guidance on acquisitions. As significant private collections, assembled over the past three to four decades, begin to change hands through estate transitions and deacquisitions, the gallery has seen a marked increase in demand for works by the movement’s most recognized figures.

The contemporary Native American art movement emerged in the 1960s, principally from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, where a generation of Indigenous artists were exposed to Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and global modernism alongside their own tribal artistic traditions. The artists who trained and taught at IAIA, including Scholder, Cannon, Houser, Red Star, and Biss, went on to dismantle a century of romanticised, outsider-produced imagery of Native Americans, replacing it with work that was confrontational, culturally grounded, and formally ambitious. Their paintings and sculptures are now held by major museums and private collections throughout the United States and internationally.

Among the most sought-after works in the gallery’s current inventory is American Portrait #43 (1982), a major oil on canvas by Fritz Scholder (Luiseño, 1937–2005). Scholder is widely regarded as the most influential Native American artist of the twentieth century. His work fused Pop Art’s saturated palette with a confrontational approach to Indigenous representation that redefined the genre. He studied under Wayne Thiebaud at Sacramento City College before joining IAIA as an instructor, where he influenced an entire generation of Native artists.

The gallery also holds Hopi with Manta (1976), a woodblock print by T.C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo, 1946–1978), Scholder’s most celebrated student. Cannon painted Native figures as fully modern participants in the global art conversation, synthesising traditional imagery with the colour and compositional strategies of Matisse and the Fauves. His death in a car accident at thirty-one cut short one of the most promising careers in American art, and his surviving works are prized for both their power and their scarcity.

Kevin Red Star (Apsáalooke/Crow, b. 1943), a member of IAIA’s inaugural class in 1962, has devoted more than five decades to painting the culture, ceremonies, and historical figures of the Crow Nation. His acrylic painting Crow Warrior Visions (c. 1987–1989), currently held by Windsor Betts, presents five warriors in full ceremonial regalia against a luminous golden field, each detail of bone hairpipe breastplate and eagle feather arrangement carrying specific cultural meaning within Apsáalooke tradition.

Earl Biss (Apsáalooke/Crow, 1947–1998) was Red Star’s classmate at IAIA and his second cousin. Where Red Star pursued cultural documentation with ethnographic precision, Biss channelled his Crow heritage through sweeping expressionistic landscapes. His monumental People of the Big Sky (1986), a 72 x 96 inch oil on canvas, is among the most commanding works in the gallery’s collection, its luminous colour and dynamic brushwork evoking the vast skies and open plains of Montana.

John Nieto (1936–2018) brought a Fauvist sensibility to Native American subject matter. Of Hispanic and Native American descent, Nieto studied at Southern Methodist University before travelling to Paris, where he discovered the explosive colour of early twentieth-century French painting. His acrylic painting Bead Maker, held by the gallery, places a single figure at the centre of a celebration of Native material culture and artistic heritage, rendered in the electric blues, magentas, and greens that became his signature.

Windsor Betts Art Brokerage is located at 217 Galisteo Street in downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is open daily. The gallery’s full collection, spanning 24 curated categories from ledger drawings and Pueblo pottery to contemporary painting and bronze sculpture, can be viewed at windsorbetts.com.