Kent Monkman facts for kids

Kent Monkman, Salon Indien, 2006, installation with silent film theatre, part of Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World, Art Gallery of Ontario, 2009.

Kent Monkman OC (born 13 November 1965) is a First Nations artist from Canada. He is a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation in Manitoba. Monkman lives and works in Toronto and New York City.

He creates art using many different forms. These include painting, film and video art, performance art, and installation art. In the early 2000s, Monkman created his two-spirit alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.

Monkman has shown his art in many solo exhibitions. These have been in museums and galleries across Canada, the United States, and Europe. He is known around the world for his colorful and detailed artworks. His art often combines different styles and retells historical stories.

Biography of Kent Monkman

Monkman was born in St. Marys, Ontario, and grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He studied at several art schools in Canada and the U.S. He graduated from Sheridan College in 1986.

Monkman designed sets and costumes for plays by Native Earth Performing Arts. In 2017, he received an award from the Mark S. Bonham Centre at the University of Toronto. He was also a grand marshal for Pride Toronto that year. He highlighted the importance of recognizing Indigenous people during Canada's 150th anniversary.

Théâtre de cristal. Valencian Museum of Ethnology, temporary exhibition "Beyond Hollywood: American Indian identities"

The Art Museum at the University of Toronto asked Monkman to create an exhibit. It was called "Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience." This exhibit explored how Canada's 150 years affected Indigenous peoples. It showed the differences between Canadian national stories and Indigenous experiences.

In 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York asked Monkman to create two paintings. These paintings, called mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People), were displayed in the museum's Great Hall. In 2020, the Met bought these paintings. They are a diptych (two paintings meant to be together) titled Welcoming the Newcomers and Resurgence of the People.

Monkman identifies himself and his alter ego, Miss Chief, as two-spirit.

Kent Monkman's Art Style

Kent Monkman's art helps people understand unfairness and how powerful ideas work. He uses a technique called mimicry. This means he copies something but changes it to make a new point. He makes people from Western cultures realize that while they were looking at Indigenous people, Indigenous people were also looking at them.

He often uses old 19th-century landscape paintings. He changes them to talk about how Indigenous culture was taken over by settlers. His art explores different ideas like artist and model, colonizer and colonized, and male and female.

Using Images from Colonizers

Monkman's painting Trappers of Men (2006) is an example. He takes an 1868 landscape painting by Albert Bierstadt. But he changes the scene to midday and replaces animals with confused white people. He also adds a Lakota historian and his alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.

Monkman uses the style of old European artists, but he changes the meaning. He creates funny and ironic artworks that show attitudes towards First Nations culture. Some people have criticized him for using mimicry. However, others argue that he is changing the meaning of harmful ideas. Monkman wants non-Indigenous Canadians to see the history of colonization in a new way.

Art Methods and Inspiration

Monkman uses the style of Old Masters paintings. This helps him show strong feelings like sadness and longing. He was very inspired by a painting called Execution of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Málaga (1888).

Starting in 2017, Monkman and his team began a "protesters series." These works were based on photos from the Standing Rock protests. They combined these photos with classic battle scene paintings. Models posed in a classic style with modern subjects. Then, photos were projected onto large canvases, traced, and painted by assistants. Monkman then added his final touches.

Miss Chief Eagle Testickle

Miss Chief Eagle Testickle is Kent Monkman's two-spirit alter ego. She is a hunter, artist, activist, hero, and performer. She is also a mythical time traveler. She exists from the creation of the world to colonial times, both past and present.

The name "Miss Chief" sounds like "mischief." This shows her role as a trickster in Monkman's art. "Eagle Testickle" sounds like "egotistical." This hints at what Monkman sees as the self-importance of 19th-century European-North American artists.

Monkman was interested in colonial artists who showed Indigenous peoples in an "idealized" way. These artists tried to "freeze" Indigenous peoples in a perfect past that was lost. Or they showed "pristine landscapes of Canada" with no Indigenous people. Monkman was interested in the artists' own views when they made these paintings.

Monkman says his inspiration for Miss Chief came from George Catlin's painting Dance to the Berdash (1835-1837). Monkman states that Miss Chief helps him make serious topics a bit lighter.

Portrait of the Artist as Hunter

In Portrait of The Artist as Hunter (2002), an acrylic painting, Miss Chief is shown hunting. She rides a white horse without a saddle across the Great Plains. Monkman uses John Mix Stanley’s painting Buffalo Hunt (1845) as a base. Stanley's painting showed Indigenous men as mysterious and exotic. Monkman's version shows a cowboy with his bottom exposed, suggesting he will be dominated by Miss Chief.

Two-Spirit Identity and Queerness

Miss Chief has an idealized strong body. This challenges how two-spirit people were shown in the 19th century as weak or inferior. By mixing this strength with modern drag makeup and queerness, Miss Chief challenges current ideas about masculinity and Indigenous identity. These ideas are often based on old historical stories.

Monkman wants to bring Indigenous perspectives into history. Miss Chief shows that we cannot understand today's views of Indigenous people and two-spiritedness without knowing the past. She reminds us that we are still influenced by these old ideas and images.

Miss Chief's Style and Fashion

Miss Chief is always traveling between Europe and Canada. She always comes back with the newest fashions. Some people have called her "inauthentic" because of this. But Miss Chief "blurs the accepted boundaries" between what is considered real and what is not.

Miss Chief as a Trickster

Miss Chief is a trickster. She is hard to define, always changing, charming, upsetting, silly, playful, and revealing. She can move between different ideas that shape life in North America. She challenges ideas like past and present, resistance and cooperation, and real and fake.

Group of Seven Inches

While Monkman was an artist-in-residence at the McMichael Gallery, a problematic film was shown. It was Edward S. Curtis’ film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914). In 2005, after seeing this, Monkman performed The Taxonomy of The European Male. Parts of this performance were used in his film Group of Seven Inches.

The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle

In 2023, Monkman and Gisèle Gordon published a two-volume fictional memoir about Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. It follows her journey through history. The first book was nominated for a major Canadian award in 2024.

Select Exhibitions

• Polarities, Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, 1993
• The Prayer Language, Indian and Inuit Art Gallery, Hull, Quebec, October 11 - November 22, 2001
• Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, January 26 - March 5, 2017
• Kent Monkman: Being Legendary, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, October 8, 2022 - April 16, 2023

Awards

• Indspire Award (2014)
• Premier's Awards for Excellence in the Arts (2017)
• Officer of Order of Canada (2023)

See also

In Spanish: Kent Monkman para niños