Kent Monkman Research Articles

Miss Chief and the Art of Decolonial Tease

This discussion posits that the work of the Cree artist Kent Monkman offers a unique and potent contribution to the project of decolonisation rooted in an Indigenised context. Focusing on the parodic, art historical interventions of his artistic alter ego Miss Chief, it explores his art in view of ‘transmotion’, a crucial but often overlooked aspect of postindian tricksterism outlined by the Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor, as well as the postindian approach to translation. His approach will be considered against the foil of the project of decolonising proposed by the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, framed in terms of a post-abyssal ecology of knowledges, with a focus on the notion of intercultural translation and the motion of the swerve he proposes. The discussion concludes by positing the Vizenorian figure of the mixedblood, urban earthdiver as figurehead for a decolonial era of the future, supplanting the urban flâneur of modernity.

“The Scream”: Using the Visual Critical Pedagogy of Subversive Indigenous Art in the Elementary Classroom to Discomfort the Comforted and Activate the Empathic, Ethical, and Relational Dimensions of Reconciliation

This paper uncovers my journey as K-12 practitioner in British Columbia towards exploring the use of “subversive art” as a “visual critical pedagogy” (Gil-Glazier,2015; Naidus,2005; Peters, 2016; Zorilla & Tisdell, 2016) to advance my students and myself towards reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples in Canada. I use the powerfully unsettling painting done by Cree artist, Kent Monkman, titled “The Scream”, as a springboard for this inquiry. “The Scream” provides an Indigenous counternarrative to the colonial versions of residential school histories and has the potential to progress practitioners and students towards actionable reconciliation by activating their empathic and ethical consciousness. I attempt in this essay to weave together a cluster of concepts, as I explore: (a) the nature and evolution of truth in BC’s elementary school curriculum (Andersen, 2017); (b) the historical establishment of the curriculum in a positivist modality (Gadamer, 2013; Greene, 1975; Marker 2004); (c) Greene’s (1995) argument that aesthetic education can help students and practitioners to engage meaningfully with difficult knowledge; (d) Greene’s (1977, 1995) philosophy of wide-awakeness, through which students and practitioners can activate the power of difficult knowledge; (e) Gadamer’s (2013) “fusion of horizons” as a means by which wide-awakeness can function in this context; (f) “subversive art” as a form of “visual critical pedagogy” (Gil-Glazer, 2015); (g) and the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire. I braid these concepts together using the scholarship of Indigenous scholar, Michael Marker (1951-2021) to provide the pedagogical rationale for my determination to establish the visual critical pedagogy of “subversive art” in my classroom.
 
 Key Words
 Subversive art, Visual critical pedagogy, Reconciliation, K-12 education, Practitioner inquiry

Redistancing Romanticism: Kent Monkman, Indigenous Perspectives, and the Art of History

Abstract: Over the last decade, Cree visual and performance artist Kent Monkman has undertaken an innovative and searching exploration of Romantic painting. Yet, the centrality of Romanticism in his oeuvre has hitherto been misunderstood. Drawing on the resources of Romantic historiography, he modulates historical distance—sympathetic proximity and cerebral distanciation—not only to "redistance" history to meet contemporary needs, but to complicate the movements of identification and alienation. Monkman's work may be ironic, but his is a strangely compassionate irony in which the relationship between European and non-Indigenous peoples is framed with a delicate hope for sincere reconciliation.

Indigenous language use in museum spaces

AbstractIn the summer of 2020, two museums in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, simultaneously hosted art exhibitions by Indigenous artists. The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) hosted an exhibition of works by Shuvinai Ashoona, an Inuk artist part of the Dorset Fine Arts Co‐operative, based in Kinngait, Nunavut. At the same time, the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) hosted an exhibition of the work of Kent Monkman, a Cree artist known for exploring themes of colonization and sexuality in his work. Each exhibition offered signage in an Indigenous language: in Inuktitut and Cree, respectively. Reflecting on the ways Inuktitut and Cree were used in these exhibitions has led us to write this review article, in which we draw on recent scholarship that addresses questions of language in museum spaces (Sönmez et al., 2020; Lazzeretti, 2016).

New Romantic Painting and the Image of History

ABSTRACT For contemporary Cree artist Kent Monkman, painting offers a means of rehistoricizing Indigenous life. However, rather than attempt to capture a putative authenticity, Monkman's work questions the relationship between visual representation and historical truth, deeply complicating his own task. This complication is managed in part through the careful deployment of self-reflection, such that the images of history he composes always advertise their unstable relationship to the past and the present, questioning theirs authority in the process of exposing how European artists attempted to establish their own. This exploration produces works that are highly citational, in which figures and elements from across European history and art history are juxtaposed and arranged into fantastic, anachronistic tableaus. But it is especially the works of Romantic painters that serve him as models for remodeling and settings for repopulation. Indeed, if Romantic painters such as George Catlin (1769–1872), Paul Kane (1810–71), and Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) flatten Indigenous people or actually evacuate them from North American landscapes, Monkman does not simply reject their work but realizes in it a rich potential for dialogic revision. In Monkman's painting, Romanticism's own historical self-consciousness finds new expression.

Indigenous Linguistic and Cultural Revitalization in Canada: Toward the Demarginalization of Indigenous Narrative Voices and “Texts”

ABSTRACT This article will briefly present the work of five intercultural mediators who have contributed actively to sharing knowledge between dominant and Indigenous groups in Canada—Robert Dickson (interlinguistic settler translator); Tompson Highway (Cree writer, (self-)translator, and dramatist); An Antane Kapesh (Innu writer); José Mailhot (interlinguistic settler translator); and Kent Monkman (Cree painter and (intra-)semiotic (self-)translator). While Highway and Dickson produce “minor” narrative texts, “minor” will also be applied to the field of the visual arts to discuss Kent Monkman’s use of Cree in certain works and his rewriting of canonical works of art. The article will examine the extent to which these five mediators are “(un)known” and their works have entered a transnational space. Furthermore, the article will analyze the relations of these mediators with their respective Indigenous, and English or French language(s) and culture(s). The case studies are aimed at adding to the literature on the narrative activities of members of minority cultures, which have managed to penetrate a global translation zone. The political dimension of intercultural mediation will also be briefly assessed. Finally, the interlinguistic translators of Kapesh’s essays and Highway’s novel will be considered as mediators for dominant culture recognition.

How Wild Can It Be?

How Wild Can It Be?

Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience. Kent Monkman

<i>Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience</i>. Kent Monkman

Pornoarchaeology of Kent Monkman’s Group of Seven Inches

ABSTRACT Kent Monkman’s Group of Seven Inches: A Titillating Taxonomy of the Customs and Manners of the European Male reanimates early cinema and envisions a new history of diverse Indigenous sexuality. In order to foreground the complex array of media present in this video, I employ an interdisciplinary method of historical excavation and categorization. Monkman’s work consistently features lures, little clues that the recreation of an historical style is intended to be a critical engagement with the methods of historical knowledge. I refer to this lure as solicitation, and coin pornoarchaeology as my method of excavation through the histories of art and cinema. In this case study, I follow the lure and explore silent film, 1950s and 1960s beefcake, pulp fiction erotica, and 1970s gay pornographic films. I argue that this intertextual approach reconfigures the world that Monkman has built.

On Second Thought

On Second Thought

Translating the “Dead Indian”: Kent Monkman, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, and the Painting of the American West

This article examines the work of Kent Monkman, an artist of Cree ancestry, and his Indigenous interventions into art of the American West. Known for his provocative and highly sexualized genre, Monkman, along with his gender fluid alter ego and companion, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, have been upsetting the art world for more than a decade. By using Thomas King’s (Cherokee) concept of the “Dead Indian”, I examine how Monkman’s work revitalises Indigenous histories and places them in the centre of the paintings by the 19th-century German-American artist of the American West, Albert Bierstadt. By repurposing the scene, Monkman translates the images from anachronistic settler-colonial narratives and uses these images from the past to highlight Indigenous narratives of the American West.

Interiorist interventions and archival strategies: Contemporary terms for museums and creative practitioners

The contested interior space of the museum and its artifacts are receiving due attention. Museum objectors are altering content, examining unacknowledged assumptions and biases, and developing new ways of seeing and experiencing that will act as new models for critical, creative discourse. Museum objectors range from entire countries (notably Greece, which has been asking the British Museum to return the marble gods of the Parthenon since 1833), to community groups and creative practitioners. A prime example of the latter type of museum objector was Marcel Duchamp. His interiorist interventions of the 1930s and 1940s set the tone for creative practice within the notion of interiority, informed exhibition display and experience, and expanded museum discourse. This paper proposes that Marcel Duchamp extended his creative artistic practice into the field of interior design to subvert critical discourse on authoritarian aesthetics and display. Within this context of critical reflection, the museum as an artistic medium is also fast becoming an accepted methodology of creative practice. To examine this practical, creative work, we first draw on Jacques Derrida’s theoretical discussion about the concept of ‘the archive,’ to acknowledge the language of interiority and to focus on the ‘curated interior’ by juxtaposing the domestic and institutional interior and the notion of topology as a form of creative methodology. As a stepping-off-point, we will explore Marcel Duchamp’s conceptual nuances of the interior, specifically his La Boîte-en-valise, as a masterful blending of the archive (collection), the melding of creative disciplines, and commentary on the museum practices. We will then examine the challenges faced by two American and one Canadian museums’ exhibitions in the 1980s, followed by a review of more recent works highlighting progressive change within these museums. The works by Spring Hurlbut in 2001 and Kent Monkman and Wangechi Mutu in 2019 illustrate evolving discussions about the use of creative practitioners working with museum collections and interiors. As the landscape of the curated interior within the institutional setting (museum) has changed, it is a crucial time to take stock of the different possibilities when addressing the spaces between the memories of the archive: what is remembered, how it was/is remembered? This new methodology of museum as artistic medium is substantially expanding modern critical discourse on the interiority and the archive.

Camping Out with Miss Chief: Kent Monkman's Ironic Journey

ABSTRACT This article explores the many ways Cree artist Kent Monkman uses irony, parody, and camp humor to subvert mythologized visions of the American West that excluded Native Americans or treated them as a dying people, frozen in time. Monkman thrusts himself into large-scale western landscapes in the form of a transgender, camp alter ego named “Miss Chief” who disrupts multiple romanticized views of the American landscape. In true trickster fashion, Miss Chief at once shapes and disrupts history, serving as a corrective to a settler narrative that imagined a future without a Native presence.

Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, McCord Museum, Montréal, February 8 to May 5, 2019, Curated by Kent Monkman

Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, McCord Museum, Montréal, February 8 to May 5, 2019, Curated by Kent Monkman

Les têtes, les cœurs et les musées

Museums as colonial institutions are filled with the tensions and contradictions of competing discourses. This makes them complex sites of public pedagogy and informal adult education and learning. But they are also becoming important spaces of counter-narrative, self-representation, and resistance as Indigenous artists and curators intervene, and thus key spaces for settler education and truth telling about colonialism. My study inquires into the pedagogies of Cree artist Kent Monkman’s touring exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience through the lens of my own unsettling as I engage autoethnographically with the exhibition. I highlight the unsettling pedagogical potentials of Monkman’s exhibition and contend that, as a site of experiential learning that challenges Euro-Western epistemologies and pedagogies with more holistic, relational, storied approaches, the exhibition offers much to unsettle and inform public pedagogy and adult education theory, practice, and research within and beyond museums.

Imagining between possible and realized: Creative world-making as politically situated knowledge production

In this rejoinder to Dragos Simandan’s (2019) consolidated theory of the partiality of geographical knowledge, I draw on feminisms of colour, including Black and Chicanx feminisms, to re-place power at the heart of how we understand the situatedness and limitations of how we know, experience and produce worlds. Furthermore, dissatisfied with Simandan’s binary construction of ‘possible worlds’ (in plural) and the ‘realized world’ (in singular), and his call to move beyond ‘ simply social difference’ (my emphasis) in how we theorize the partiality of geographical knowledge, I centre creative practices by marginalized people as practices that conjoin navigating the unjust ‘real’ world and imagining different, more just worlds. The artistic works of Cree/Irish artist Kent Monkman provide powerful examples of art as geographical knowledge that makes room both for critiques of the gender, racial and sexual violence of settler colonial world-making and for the agentive production of alternate worlds by Indigenous people, including through their creative practices.

THE ETHICAL CHALLENGES OF RECOVERING HISTORICAL MEMORY SEEING LAND: RESITUATING LANDSCAPES THROUGH CONTEMPORARY INDIGENOUS ART EXHIBITIONS

Canadian landscapes on gallery walls in art museums serve as a primer for understanding the nation. Visitors cannot easily escape the purposeful emptiness of rugged scenes meant to visually assure them of the nation’s right to colonial possession. Most viewers respond positively to these pretty pictures because such ways of seeing the art history of Canada has been naturalized and normalized, appearing politically neutral. Ubiquitous Canadian landscape paintings also reinforce colonial claiming of land and authorize erasure of Indigenous relations with the land. Understanding the noted landscapes as something other than part of a national narrative, however, has not been widely accepted, even as a sanctioned mandate to broaden art historical narratives has resulted in displaying additional Indigenous art in galleries. In an analysis that considers ways to re-vision the privileged colonial narrative present in Canadian art museums, deeper ethical issues arise in relation to institutional structures. Here the analysis focuses on three projects in and around Canada 150, including examples such as Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience (2017–2020, Kent Monkman), the rehanging of Norval Morrisseau’s Artist and Shaman between Two Worlds (1980) at the National Gallery of Canada, and the Michael Belmore and A. J. Casson: Nkweshkdaadiimgak Miinwaa Bakeziibiisan/Confluences and Tributaries exhibit at the Ottawa Art Gallery (2018, Ottawa). This essay explores questions regarding whether ways of seeing land differently come about simply by hanging Indigenous art on institutional walls or whether more systemic change is required.

Verwobenin “Indianthusiasm”: A Uniquely German Entanglement

AbstractThe German fascination with North American Indigenous peoples is extensive. Primarily based on the writings of the nineteenth-century German author Karl May, the Indianer permeates German culture, and yet it is little known outside Central Europe. Many North American Indigenous artists, writers, filmmakers, and performance artists are aware of this phenomenon and are often met with resistance from a German perspective when they intervene and assert their voices into the conversation. This article examines the German fascination with North American Indigenous peoples and contemporary Indigenous responses. Kent Monkman and Drew Hayden Taylor challenge the constructed German images of Indigeneity by practicing what Gerald Vizenor has termed “Native survivance.” Ideas of colonialism, sexuality, and contemporaneity are challenged and expose deep-rooted cultural and societal truths regarding Indigenous peoples in North America and their Indianer counterparts.

Here and Now: Indigenous Canadian Perspectives and New Media in Works by Ruben Komangapik, Kent Monkman and Adrian Duke

Examining the use of new media in works by Ruben Komangapik, Kent Monkman and the Wikiup Indigenous Knowledge Network reveals the diverse ways in which technologies are used to disrupt linear time and Western visions of history. New media works challenge those misleading stories that have been told about Canada’s indigenous peoples and assert indigenous presence in both the digital and physical landscape. These artists employ QR codes, video and augmented reality to push artistic boundaries and create representations of the past and present.

Crash: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Indigenous Art

Kent Monkman, Casualties of Modernity, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 36 × 48 in. (91.4 × 121.9 cm) (artwork © Kent Monkman; photograph provided by the artist) If we understand Car Crash, then, as “traum...