Kent Monkman
Kent Monkman OC | |
|---|---|
| Born | 13 November 1965 St. Mary's, Ontario, Canada |
| Citizenship | Fisher River Cree Nation |
| Known for | performance artist, painter |
| Style | socio-political art |
| Awards | Officer of the Order of Canada (2023) Indspire Award (2014) Premier's Award for Excellence in the Arts (2017) |
| Website | www |
Kent Monkman OC[1] (born 13 November 1965) is a Cree First Nations painter. He is a citizen of the Fisher River Cree Nation in Manitoba's Interlake Region.[2] Monkman lives and works between Toronto and New York City.[3][4]
He works in painting, film/video art, performance art, and installation art.[3] In the early 2000s, Monkman developed his two-spirit alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.[5] He has had many solo exhibitions at museums and galleries in Canada, the United States, and Europe.[3] He has achieved international recognition for colourful and detailed works that combine genre conventions and recast historical narratives.[2]
Biography
[edit]Monkman was born in St. Marys, Ontario, and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba.[2][5] He attended various Canadian and U.S. institutions, including the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the Sundance Institute in Los Angeles, and the National Screen Institute.[2] He graduated with a degree in Canadian art from Sheridan College in 1986.
Monkman created sets and costumes for several Native Earth Performing Arts productions, including Lady of Silences (1993) by Floyd Favel and Diva Ojibway (1994) by Tina Mason.[5]
In 2017, Monkman received the Bonham Centre Award from the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto.[6] He also accepted the honorary title of grand marshal for Pride Toronto that year, citing the importance of recognition for Indigenous people during the 150th anniversary of Canada celebrations.[7]
Barbara Fischer, curator of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, 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."[8] The exhibit sought to look at what Canada's 150 years meant for Indigenous peoples.[9][10]
In 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned two paintings from Monkman for its Great Hall, entitled mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People).[11][12] In 2020, the Met acquired the diptych of paintings entitled Welcoming the Newcomers (2019) and Resurgence of the People (2019),[5] as well as publishing Revision and Resistance: mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) (2020).[13]
Monkman has identified both himself and Miss Chief as two-spirit.[14][15][16]
Art practice
[edit]According to Michael Bick, Monkman's work "convey[s] a deep understanding of oppression and the mechanisms at work in dominant ideology."[17]: 47 Through his use of mimicry, Monkman subverts and de-centers the Western gaze; playing with role reversal, he makes colonial audiences aware that "you've been looking at us [but] we've also been looking at you."[17]: 30 He appropriates classical 19th-century landscapes, speaking to the appropriation and assimilation of Indigenous culture by colonial settlers.[18] 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."[19]: 24
Use of colonizers' images
[edit]Monkman's 2006 Trappers of Men painting takes an 1868 landscape painting by Albert Bierstadt, but portrays the scene at midday, replacing animals with perplexed white people from American art and political history, a Lakota historian, and Monkman's two-spirit alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.[20]
Monkman "us[es] the Master's language, but his speech subverts rather than upholds the paradigm of oppression."[17]: 40 He creates ironic, often humorous representations of attitudes towards First Nations culture.[2]
He has been criticized for using mimicry,[citation needed] but it has also been argued that he is "chang[ing] the signification of the language of oppression, [as] even the minority artist must appeal to a mainstream audience."[17]: 40 Monkman attempts to get non-Indigenous Canadians to see the history of colonization and its representations under a new light.[21]
Style and method
[edit]Monkman adopts the Old Master style of painting to express emotions.[8] He has been inspired particularly by Antonio Gisbert's Execution of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Málaga (1888).