Kent Monkman

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 (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. Monkman lives and works between Toronto and New York City.

He works in painting, film/video art, performance art, and installation art. He has had many solo exhibitions at museums and galleries in Canada, the United States, and Europe. 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.

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." The exhibit sought to look at what Canada's 150 years meant for Indigenous peoples.

In 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned two paintings from Monkman for its Great Hall, entitled mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People). In 2020, the Met acquired the diptych of paintings entitled Welcoming the Newcomers (2019) and Resurgence of the People (2019),

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

Art practice According to Michael Bick, Monkman's work "convey 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; playing with role reversal, he makes colonial audiences aware that "you've been looking at us [but] we've also been looking at you." 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."

Use of colonizers' images 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.

Monkman "us[es] the Master's language, but his speech subverts rather than upholds the paradigm of oppression."

Style and method Monkman adopts the Old Master style of painting to express emotions. 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.

Controversy Monkman's painting Hanky Panky depicts the former 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 initially suggested that the scene was a consensual act, but later apologized for "any harm that was caused by the work." Indigenous critics disparaged Monkman's portrayal of sexual violence, especially his portrayal of Indigenous women participating in voyeuristic rape.

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."

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. "Eagle Testickle" sounds like "egotistical", to allude to "what Monkman sees as the egotism of 19th century [Euro-North American] artists." As Penny Cousineau-Levine claims, by originally identifying with Cher, "Miss Chief foregrounds her 'half-breed' identity." Dayna Mcleod explains: "Miss Chief's name speaks to (mis)representations of Indigeneity, gender, and sexuality and disrupts all three."

Monkman was interested in colonial artists who documented "highly idealized representations of Canadian Aboriginal peoples as noble savages." These depictions "sought to 'freeze' [Indigenous peoples] in these idealized, yet lost times" or "depict 'pristine landscapes of Canada' that were 'void of reference to native peoples'." Monkman was interested in the "subjective position of the artists who produce Western American wild frontier paintings". Jonathan Katz argues that Monkman is concerned with the "telling of the past, as opposed to the past itself."

Portrait of the Artist as Hunter 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. 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."

Monkman aims to indigenize history through fluidity of gender. 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."

Iconography and fashion 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.

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. 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.

The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle 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.

The first volume was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction at the 2024 Governor General's Awards.

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 Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors, Denver Art Museum, Denver, April 20, 2025 – August 17, 2025; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, September 27, 2025 – March 8, 2026

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