Kent Monkman

He was particularly moved by Antonio Gisbert's Execution of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Málaga (1888).

Kent Monkman (born 13 November 1965) is a Canadian First Nations artist of Cree ancestry.

He is a member of the Fisher River band situated in Manitoba's Interlake Region.

Monkman lives and works in Toronto, Ontario.

He works in painting, film/video, and installation.

He graduated from Oakville's Sheridan College in 1986 (Canadian Art).

Monkman created sets and costumes for several productions for Native Earth Performing Arts including Lady of Silences (1993) by Floyd Favel and Diva Ojibway (1994).

In the early 2000s, Monkman developed his gender-fluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.

He has had many solo exhibitions at museums and galleries in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

He has achieved international recognition for colourful and richly detailed works that combine genre conventions to recast historical narrative.

Monkman was born in St. Mary's, Ontario, Canada and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Having art instruction as a youth proved to be a formative experience for Monkman.

He later attended various Canadian and US institutions, including the Banff Centre, the Sundance Institute in Los Angeles, and the Canadian Screen Training Institute.

Monkman's 2006 Trappers of Men painting takes an 1868 landscape by Albert Bierstadt, but portrays the scene at midday replacing animals with perplexed whites from American art and political history, a Lakota historian, and Monkman's two-spirited alter-ego.

Monkman uses the colonizers' own methodologies, "…to participate in using the Master's language, but his speech subverts rather than upholds the paradigm of oppression".

"The artist uses close re-creation of earlier artworks as an opportunity for ironic, often humorous representation of historical attitudes towards First Nations culture, attitudes that persist today".

He is criticized for using mimicry, but he "effect[s] change on a systematic level, to change the signification of the language of oppression, even the minority artist must appeal to a mainstream audience".

"Monkman's work might be considered controversial to some, especially in Alberta, where traditional images of the Old West are held near and dear to the heart, but Monkman hopes it helps Albertans see historic representations of colonization under a new light".

Monkman adopts the Old Masters style of painting to express emotions like grief and longing.

He also accepted the honorary title of grand marshal for Toronto's Pride parade that year, citing the importance of Canada's 150th anniversary and raising awareness of his work.

Curator of the University of Toronto art museum, Barbara Fischer, commissioned Monkman's exhibit, "Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience" to "set up a provocative friction between Canadian national myths, aboriginal experience and traditional European art practices."

The exhibit sought to bring the Indigenous experience into the conversation, looking also at what Canada's 150 years meant for Indigenous people.

In 2017, Monkman received the Bonham Centre Award from The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto, for his contributions to the advancement of issues around sexual identification.

On a project beginning in 2017, Monkman and his team began working on a "protesters series" based on the Standing Rock protests where they combined photographs from the protest with classic battle scene paintings.

Models posed in a classic style with modern subjects; then the photographs were projected on large canvas, traced and base-painted by assistants before Monkman did his finishing touches.

He derived Miss Chief's Wet Dream (2018) from two French paintings, The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) by Théodore Géricault, and Christ on the Sea of Galilee (1854) by Eugène Delacroix, to evoke Canada's relationship between Indigenous peoples and colonizers.

Kent Monkman's painting Hanky Panky depicts the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, restrained and on all fours with his pants down as Monkman's alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, approaches him from behind holding up a red sex toy in the shape of praying hands.

Monkman generated controversy by suggesting that the rape scene was a consensual act, but later apologized for "any harm that was caused by the work".

Commentators focused on depicting the Prime Minister that way.

Indigenous critics disparaged Monkman's view of sexual violence, especially his portrayal of Indigenous women participating in, and even enjoying, voyeuristic rape.

As the Public Service Alliance of Canada notes, "Indigenous women and girls in Canada are disproportionately affected by violence."

Moreover, some declared that Monkman incorrectly prioritizes the white-colonialist perspective, "fall[ing] in with a tradition of artists voicing the perspective of Indigenous groups that do not wholly belong to them."

In 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned two paintings from Monkman for its Great Hall, entitled "mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People)."

He appropriates classical 19th-century landscapes, speaking to the appropriation and assimilation of Indigenous culture by colonial settlers.

He targets both the Indigenous communities and Euro-American communities affected by colonialism, generally playing with role reversal to do so.

Some of the binaries he tackles are "artist and model, colonial explorer and colonized subject, gazer and gazed upon, male and female, straight and queer, past and present, real and imaginary".

In 2020, the Met acquired the diptych entitled Welcoming the Newcomers (2019) and Resurgence of the People (2019) and published Revision and Resistance: mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) (2020).

Monkman has officially identified both himself and Miss Chief as two-spirit.

Monkman's work "convey[s] a deep understanding of oppression and the mechanisms at work in dominant ideology."

Through his use of mimicry, Monkman subverts and de-centers the Western Gaze; he makes colonial audiences aware that "you've been looking at us [but] we've also been looking at you".