Artist Spotlight - Kent Monkman
Kent Monkman, born on November 13, 1965, is a Canadian artist with indigenous roots. As a member of the Cree tribe, Monkman uses his art, ranging from paintings to installations to performance, to address the oppression of native culture by dominant western culture and represent the neglected indigenous perspective during colonialism.
In his most popular work, Monkman undermines colonial culture by using mimicry and role reversal with Western imagery, juxtaposing the colonial explorer and the colonized subject often in an ironic and humorous way. For example, the acrylic on canvas piece below titled Resurgence of the People was commissioned in 2019 and later bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (aka the MET). It is a clear play on the famous Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze.
Monkman uses his gender-fluid alter ego (Miss Chief Eagle Testickle) to "present a very empowered point of view of Indigenous... sexuality pre-contact". This persona is not only the subject of many of his paintings like the one shown above, but also a part of the artist himself. In Resurgence of the People, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle replaces George Washington in Washington Crossing the Delaware, resiliently holding a singular eagle feather as the men and women around her rescue those lost in the water.
More famously, he create a performance art wedding with his alter ego. In this "wedding" he reclaimed a white feather headdress by "marrying" luxury fashion designer Jean Paul Gautier, who designed the headdress. Gautier was slammed for creating this headdress because in native culture the headdress must be earned, so it became a matter of cultural appropriation. However, he claimed that he used the headdress because it was symbolic of power and leadership, thus by including it in a wedding look, he suggested that women could have more power then a man. In this wedding, the couple pledged to "recognize each other's culture and celebrate their individual uniqueness as strengths" until death do them part. It was seen as a resolution to cultural appropriation in the fashion and art world.
More recently, the Cree artist has been utilizing iconic modern art in solo portraits of his alter ego. The Great Mystery, for instance, replaces a normal landscape for a Rothko. A list of Monkman’s current and upcoming exhibitions can be seen here.