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Close friends, historians, and artists shed light on the life of Earl Biss, the Crow artist who helped spearhead the contemporary Indigenous art movement.  (Reprinted from Essential West, with the permission of Mark Sublette/Medicine Man Gallery)

My favorite artist is Earl Biss. No. 2: Vincent van Gogh. When I say Earl Biss is my favorite artist, I’m not grading on a scale. I don’t mean my favorite painter or Native American artist; I mean my favorite artist.

I’ve felt a spiritual connection to Biss’ paintings, and him, from the moment I first saw his work. It’s unlike anything before or since. That first time was at The James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art in St. Petersburg, Florida, and I remember the moment as distinctly as I recall seeing my wife for the first time.

Lisa Gerstner’s documentary Earl Biss: The Spirit Who Walks Among His People, released in late April 2023, shares Biss’ genius and spirit and Gerstner’s personal background with Biss.

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Emerging from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in the 1960s, Crow artist Earl Biss was a groundbreaking, dynamic, mystical, and controversial artist.

He was also wildly prolific, a student of Fritz Scholder and part of a group that included Indigenous artists Kevin Red Star and T.C. Cannon.

His sometimes-messy life is now being chronicled in a new documentary and book by filmmaker Lisa Gerstner, who had unrestricted, close access to Biss and worked with him on the project for years.

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My favorite artist is Earl Biss. Number two, Vincent van Gogh.

When I say Earl Biss is my favorite artist, I’m not grading on a scale. I don’t mean my favorite American painter or Native American artist; I mean my favorite artist.

Looking at his paintings – and this happened from the very first instance I ever saw one – I felt a spiritual connection to them, and him, unlike anything before or since. That first time was at the James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art in Saint Petersburg, FL and I remember the moment as distinctly as I do seeing my wife for the first time.

Lisa Gerstner‘s documentary, “Art of Native America: Earl Biss – The Spirit Who Walks Among His People,” released in late April of 2023 on Amazon Prime, Vimeo and Vudu, beautifully shares Biss’ genius and spirit.

The film’s production and Gerstner’s background with Biss were previously profiled by “Essential West.”

An astonishing trove of video footage and photographs from throughout Biss’ life highlights the production. Biss was born in 1947 and raised on the Apsáalooke Reservation in Montana. It’s not surprising video and pictures exist from when Biss was an artworld superstar in highfalutin Aspen, CO in the 1980s, how so many pictures and video were taken, let alone remain, of the artist’s childhood – including early childhood photos with his grandmother who raised him when he couldn’t have been more than 3-years-old – is miraculous.

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Much like a narrative film, a documentary’s only as good as its character, and Lisa Gerstner serves us the great Earl Biss, the Monet of Contemporary Native American Art, in all his philosophical and metaphysical profundity; through rare archival footage of the artistic genius himself, and hard-working investigative interview journalism with the art world’s finest critics, collectors and curators to make the definitive biographical documentary and historiographic odyssey into the artist and his imprinted truth. Gerstner’s sophistication and passion for the documentary’s construction show from the get-go, and when such personal investment goes into a documentary, it can never go wrong. Gerstner offers us peeks into the brilliant mind in his workspace habitat to show goofy, playful and cheeky side that humanises the influential art force that’s the Biss brand; these little peeks intertwine with a theoretical analysis into all of Biss’s aesthetic movements; from his signature oil painting work to his more experimental and spiritual work that encapsulates Native American history. Biss so painfully digests a tradition and culture deteriorating in one of his last few on-camera interviews within the documentary. EARL BISS: The Spirit Who Walks Among His People proves the definitive all-encompassing guide to the art legend; Gerstner does us proud and serves a priceless intimate encounter with Biss in her most sensitive, intricate, and metaphysical documentary yet. Grade B+

The fascinating and messy life of renowned Crow Nation painter and longtime Aspenite Earl Biss is the stuff of Hollywood tall tales, the dreams of biographers. Filmmaker Lisa Gerstner contends with the artist’s genius along with his contradictions and mysteries in her new film “Earl Biss: The Spirit Who Walks Among His People.”

The 94-minute feature — directed, produced and written by Gerstner, who also is his authorized biographer — will screen Saturday at the Shining Mountains Film Festival at the Wheeler Opera House amid a two-day, four-program lineup of Native American films.

The film showcases much footage of Biss himself, who died of a stroke at 51 in 1998, in revealing interviews and in the act of painting — a whirling dervish of improvisation and inspiration. It contends with the spiritual nature of Biss’ work, attempting to find what drove him to paint and trying to capture his larger-than-life presence on screen.  

Published: November 18, 2021

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Don't they know they can't capture a medicine man? - Earl Biss.
The greatest artists reach people and touch their hearts and souls. Their mark is permanent. And alive. And filled with the same magnificent beauty as when the artist themselves first discovered it, molded it and presented it to the world for each of us to find it, drink it in and let it fully encompass our beings transforming us into something better and filling in a space we didn't know we had. Earl Biss accomplishes this in his art. And the award-winning Lisa Gerstner, the brilliantly talented director, producer and editor of this wonderful documentary also accomplishes it through her story- telling of him. 

Published: February 2021

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Author Lisa Gerstner’s biography of the late, beloved Aspen-based artist Earl Biss took a fittingly winding and idiosyncratic road to publication. And, like Biss’ work, her book is now earning mainstream acclaim. Gerstner’s “Experiences with...
Published: January 9, 2020

Author Lisa Gerstner recently won two awards for the biography “Experiences with Earl Biss – The Spirit Who Walks Among His People.” She is an award-winning finalist in both the Art category and Biography category of the 2019 Best Book Awards, sponsored by the American Book Fest. Crow artist Earl Biss was a lead painter during the Contemporary Native Art Movement birthed in the 1960s during the formational years of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.M. Gerstner credits Kansas roots as a fertile field for developing her interest in fine art and the culture of Plains Indians...

Published: December 26, 2019

Editor’s note: This story originally ran in the Aspen times. Dates, times and locations have been edited to reflect upcoming showings. When the famed Crow Nation painter and longtime Aspenite Earl Biss selected Lisa Gerstner...
Published: February 13, 2019

When the famed Crow Nation painter and longtime Aspenite Earl Biss selected Lisa Gerstner as his authorized biographer in 1994, the groundbreaking artist and notorious local character unsurprisingly told the writer he did not want...
Published: January 10, 2019