Kent Monkman is among the most accomplished and provocative artists of his generation. In his visually sumptuous works, Monkman, himself of Cree, English, and Irish ancestry, plumbs various facets of his Indigenous and queer identity. In his paintings, installations, performances, and films, he challenges and disrupts common perceptions of Indigenous peoples by subverting their traditional roles in Western art history. He proposes, for instance, narratives in which the roles of Indigenous peoples and settlers are reversed, narratives that are meant as caustic—and sometimes cheeky—critiques of Canadian history and how it is told.
In the early 2000s, Monkman began to draw inspiration from nineteenth-century paintings of dramatic North American landscapes by Romantic artists such as Paul Kane (1810–71), Thomas Cole (1801–48), and Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902). Monkman’s revisioning of these landscapes, however, places the Indigenous perspective at the forefront of a new artistic, social, and political narrative. As curator Shirley Madill writes, “Monkman appropriated landscapes and infused them with camp, irony, and kitsch to skewer conventional images of Indigenous cultures. By reproducing the historical compositions, he conceptually reclaims them.” These “visual mash-ups” are evident in works such as Hungry Souls (2013), in which Monkman replicates a majestic landscape by Bierstadt titled Indians Spear Fishing (1862), but displaces the painting’s original group of Indigenous hunters with iconic works from art history. Here, the Venus of Willendorf enjoys a sumptuous feast with other figurative sculptures reminiscent of works by Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore. “Revolutionary developments in figuration by Picasso, Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966), and others drew upon and perverted the traditions of Oceanic and African art, reducing and reassembling living things and inanimate objects into two dimensional planes and geometries,” Madill observes. “Monkman sees the reductive character of their art as metaphor for modernity’s compression of Indigenous cultures.” Monkman’s recontextualization of this scene essentially mirrors the devastating effects of projecting the values of European Modernism onto Indigenous cultures, consequently erasing them.
Monkman has received numerous awards and distinctions, including an Indspire Award and an honorary doctorate from the Ontario College of Art and Design University. In 2019, he was selected to create two large-scale frescoes, Welcoming the Newcomers and Resurgence of the People (both 2019) for the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
