Hinzo, Angel M.; Schofield Clark, Lynn (17 February 2019). "Digital survivance and Trickster humor: exploring visual and digital Indigenous epistomologies in the #NoDAPL movement". Information, Communication & Society. 22 (6): 801. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2019.1573911. S2CID 150163339.
Kent Monkman OC | |
---|---|
Born | St. Mary's, Ontario, Canada | 13 November 1965
Nationality | 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 First Nations artist of Cree ancestry. He is a member of the Fisher River nation situated 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]
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]
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
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]
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). [9] On a project beginning in 2017, Monkman and his team began working on a series based on the Standing Rock protests where they combined photographs from the protest with classic battle scene paintings. [22] Models posed in the style of classic paintings, and then the photographs were projected on large canvas, traced, and base-painted by assistants before Monkman did his finishing touches. [22] He derived Miss Chief's Wet Dream (2018) from two French paintings, The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) by Théodore Géricault and Christ Asleep during the Tempest (1854) by Eugène Delacroix, to evoke Canada's relationship between Indigenous peoples and colonizers. [23]
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. [24] [25] Monkman initially suggested that the scene was a consensual act, but later apologized for "any harm that was caused by the work." [26] [27] Indigenous critics disparaged Monkman's portrayal of sexual violence, especially his portrayal of Indigenous women participating in voyeuristic rape. [24] [15] [28]
Some critics say that Monkman prioritizes the white colonial perspective and sometimes "falls in with a tradition of artists voicing the perspective of Indigenous groups that do not wholly belong to them." [15]
Miss Chief Eagle Testickle is the two-spirit alter ego that Monkman uses in his art; she is a hunter, artist, activist, seducer, hero, and performer. She is also a mythological and anachronistic time traveler, [29] existing during the creation of the world itself as well as in the “colonial spaces [of] the past and present.” [30]
The "Miss Chief" part of her name is a play on the word "mischief", to reflect Miss Chief's trickster role in many of Monkman's works. [31] "Eagle Testickle" sounds like "egotistical", to allude to “what Monkman sees as the egotism of 19th century [Euro-North American] artists.” [29] As Penny Cousineau-Levine claims, by originally identifying with Cher, “Miss Chief foregrounds her ‘half-breed’ identity." [32] Dayna Mcleod explains: “Miss Chief's name speaks to (mis)representations of Indigeneity, gender, and sexuality and disrupts all three.” [33]
Monkman was interested in colonial artists who documented “highly idealized representations of Canadian Aboriginal peoples as noble savages.” [34] These depictions “sought to ‘freeze’ [Indigenous peoples] in these idealized, yet lost times” [35] or "depict ‘pristine landscapes of Canada’ that were ‘void of reference to native peoples’.” [36] Monkman was interested in the “subjective position of the artists who produce Western American wild frontier paintings”. [37] Jonathan Katz argues that Monkman is concerned with the “telling of the past, as opposed to the past itself.” [31]
Monkman claims that his inspiration for creating Miss Chief was George Catlin's painting Dance to the Berdash (1835-1837). In response to both the painting and Catlin's remarks about traditional Indigenous conceptions of gender and sexuality, Monkman was “prompted to incorporate a persona in his paintings that would embrace gender and sexuality, honouring the tradition of the two-spirit in Indigenous societies” [5] and "create an artistic persona that could rival that of Catlin.” [35] Monkman has stated that Miss Chief helps him “lighten how [he] treats sometimes very dark subject matter.” [38]
In Portrait of The Artist as Hunter (2002), an acrylic painting depicts Miss Chief hunting while riding bare-back on a white stallion against a background of the Great Plains. [39] Monkman appropriates John Mix Stanley’s painting Buffalo Hunt (1845), which uses “the image of the [Indigenous] male and presents him as a mysterious, exotic figure; the subject of romanticized notions of the Noble Savage,” while the cowboy's exposed bottom is “a sign that he is to be dominated by his pursuant” and of “his desirability and vulnerability to sexual contact." [37]
Miss Chief possesses an idealized masculine body to challenge 19th century depictions of two-spirit people as submissive and inferior. [37] Furthermore, Miss Chief's two-spirit identity “is an assertion that... the values of settler communities have not entirely succeeded in suppressing the sexual and gender mores of [Indigenous] communities.” [32] By combining this masculinity with contemporary drag makeup and queerness, Miss Chief subverts contemporary constructions of masculinity and Indigeneity that are based on dominant historical narratives. [40]
Monkman aims to indigenize history through fluidity of gender. [41] Miss Chief shows that “the contemporary view [of Indigeneity and two-spiritedness] is incomprehensible without the past... we ourselves are still inhabited by these historical ideas and images.” [42]
Reilley Bishop-Stall suggests that Miss Chief's conflation of the customs and traditional wear of distinct Indigenous nations with settler clothing fetishizes depictions of Indigeneity in historical Western art and contemporary pop culture. [43]
Miss Chief as a character is "constantly traveling back and forth from Europe and always [comes] back with the latest fashions,” for which some have called her inauthentic. [32] As Alla Myzelev explains, Miss Chief “blurs the accepted boundaries between... authentic and inauthentic cultural formations.” [34]
Miss Chief is “a trickster, undefinable, fluid, charming, upsetting, silly, playful, revealing.” [37] She is able to travel between oppositions that “structure life in North America” by undermining polarities between “the past and present, [the] resistant and the complicit... [the] authentic and the degraded.” [31]
Despite the violence and brutality of her actions in many of Monkman's works, the irony of the depicted scenes is often humorous. [37] As literary critic Eva Gruber explains, many Indigenous artists and authors ironically “engage with the representational tropes [of Indigeneity], very nearly reproducing them in order to subvert and expose them as false constructions.” [44] Shirley Madill argues that Miss Chief's ability to “reverse the gaze of colonizers” tricks audiences into engaging with how all historical narratives are constructed. [5]
While Monkman was artist-in-residence at the McMichael Gallery in Vaughan, the gallery looped Edward S. Curtis’ film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914) in an area focused on Indigenous history, despite its problematic framing. In 2005, after seeing this, Monkman performed The Taxonomy of The European Male. [36] The content shot of that session was edited into the film Group of Seven Inches. [45]
In 2023, Monkman and Gisèle Gordon published The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a two-volume fictionalized memoir of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle following her through history. [46]
The first volume was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction at the 2024 Governor General's Awards. [47]
William "Bill" Ronald Reid Jr. also known as Iljuwas, was a Haida artist whose works include jewelry, sculpture, screen-printing, and paintings. Producing over one thousand original works during his fifty-year career, Reid is regarded as one of the most significant Northwest Coast artists of the late twentieth century. The Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art celebrates his legacy through the curation of contemporary Indigenous art.
Norval Morrisseau, also known as Copper Thunderbird, was an Indigenous Canadian artist from the Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek First Nation. He is widely regarded as the grandfather of contemporary Indigenous art in Canada. Known as the "Picasso of the North," Morrisseau created works depicting the legends of his people, the cultural and political tensions between native Canadian and European traditions, his existential struggles, and his deep spirituality and mysticism. His style is characterized by thick black outlines and bright colors. He founded the Woodlands School of Canadian art and was a prominent member of the “Indian Group of Seven."
Alexander Young Jackson LL. D. was a Canadian painter and a founding member of the Group of Seven. Jackson made a significant contribution to the development of art in Canada, and was instrumental in bringing together the artists of Montreal and Toronto. In addition to his work with the Group of Seven, his long career included serving as a war artist during World War I (1917–19) and teaching at the Banff School of Fine Arts, from 1943 to 1949. In his later years he was artist-in-residence at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario.
David Alexander Colville, LL. D. was a Canadian painter and printmaker.
The Death of General Wolfe is a 1770 painting by Anglo-American artist Benjamin West, commemorating the 1759 Battle of Quebec, where General James Wolfe died at the moment of victory. The painting, containing vivid suggestions of martyrdom, broke a standard rule of historical portraiture by featuring individuals who had not been present at the scene and dressed in modern, instead of classical, costumes. The painting has become one of the best-known images in 18th-century art.
The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS) is a public provincial art museum based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The art museum's primary building complex is located in downtown Halifax and takes up approximately 6,200 square metres (67,000 sq ft) of space. The museum complex comprises the former Dominion building and two floors of the adjacent Provincial building.
Canadian art refers to the visual as well as plastic arts originating from the geographical area of contemporary Canada. Art in Canada is marked by thousands of years of habitation by Indigenous peoples followed by waves of immigration which included artists of European origins and subsequently by artists with heritage from countries all around the world. The nature of Canadian art reflects these diverse origins, as artists have taken their traditions and adapted these influences to reflect the reality of their lives in Canada.
Robert Houle is a Saulteaux First Nations Canadian artist, curator, critic, and educator. Houle has had an active curatorial and artistic practice since the mid-1970s. He played an important role in bridging the gap between contemporary First Nations artists and the broader Canadian art scene through his writing and involvement in early important high-profile exhibitions such as Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada. As an artist, Houle has shown both nationally and internationally. He is predominantly a painter working in the tradition of Abstraction, yet he has also embraced a pop sensibility by incorporating everyday images and text into his works. His work addresses lingering aspects of colonialism and their effects on First Nation peoples. Houle often appropriates historical photographs and texts, repurposing and combining them with Anishnaabe language and traditionally used materials such as porcupine quills within his works.
Art Canada Institute is a bilingual, non-profit research organization that aims to promote and support the study of Canadian art history. It has been described as “a comprehensive, multi-tiered, online-based resource for the general public on Canadian art history." The Art Canada Institute's pillars of programming include: The Canadian Online Art Book Project, The Canadian Art Library Series, The Canadian Schools Art Education Program, The Redefining Canadian Art History Fellowship Program, the Art Canada Institute weekly newsletter, and public art talks.
Michelle LaVallee is a Canadian curator, artist, and educator. She is Ojibway and a member of the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation in Cape Croker, Ontario. She has BFA (2000) and BEd (2004) degrees from York University in Toronto.
The Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Awards, the Award for Outstanding Achievement as an Artist and the Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art are two annual arts awards of $25,000 and $10,000 that recognize mid-career Canadian visual artists and curators. The Hnatyshyn Foundation is a private charity established by Ray Hnatyshyn, Canada’s 24th Governor General.
Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe curator, artist and educator based in Toronto, Ontario. From 2016 to 2023, she held the position of the inaugural curator of Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Georgiana Uhlyarik-Nicolae, also known as Georgiana Uhlyarik is a Romanian-born Canadian art curator, art historian, and teacher. She is currently the Fredrik S. Eaton Curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). She has been part of the team or led teams that created numerous exhibitions, on subjects such as Betty Goodwin, Michael Snow, and Kathleen Munn among others and collaborated with art organizations such as the Tate Modern, and the Jewish Museum, New York.
Jeff Thomas is an Onondaga Nation photographer, curator, and cultural theorist who works and lives in Ottawa, Ontario.
Adrian Stimson is an artist and a member of the Siksika Nation.
Hanky Panky is a 2020 painting by Two-spirit Cree artist Kent Monkman. It depicts a laughing group of Cree women as they watch Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Monkman's alter ego Miss Chief Share Eagle Testickle prepare for consensual anal fisting, while past Canadian leaders look on. Kent Monkman generated controversy by suggesting that the scene was a consensual act by including a reference to the hanky code.
Inconvenient Indian is a 2020 Canadian documentary film, directed by Michelle Latimer. It is an adaptation of Thomas King's non-fiction book The Inconvenient Indian, focusing on narratives of indigenous peoples of Canada. King stars as the documentary's narrator, with Gail Maurice and other indigenous artists appearing.
Mistikôsiwak is a 2019 pair monumental historical paintings by the Canadian First Nations artist of mixed Cree and Irish descent, Kent Monkman.
W. Frank Lynn was a Canadian artist, journalist and writer, known for his paintings of early Winnipeg. He was the first professional artist to be a resident of Winnipeg.