This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times.
Determined to paint Indigenous people into art history and museums in a more meaningful way, the artist Kent Monkman created a character called Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.
The move succeeded. She appears in more than half of the 41 works in the Denver Art Museum show “Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors,” on view until Aug. 17.
A well-muscled, nonbinary and Indigenous figure, she is a key presence in Monkman’s versions of important historical moments — somehow seeming to be in many places at once. She brings mischief to the scenes, upending our understanding of art history with a smile and a pointed agenda.
Miss Chief got a burst of attention in 2019 when she appeared in two large paintings that bedecked the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for nearly a year and a half, commissions that were an important recognition of Monkman’s work.
Both are in the Denver show. In one of them, “mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People): Resurgence of the People,” she is naked except for high heels and a diaphanous, hot-pink scarf while standing astride a boat and holding out a feather. Her pose is meant to recall that of George Washington in “Washington Crossing the Delaware” and evoke other history paintings.
Monkman, 59, does not include Miss Chief in all of his works, but she embodies the philosophy behind many of his projects.
“The predominant narrative from the art history of this continent has been told very subjectively, from a settler point of view,” said Monkman, who is a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation. “I was interested in museums and what they were showing and the stories that they were telling, so I could perhaps correct some of those conversations.”
In other words, when Indigenous people are the protagonists, things look radically different.
The Denver exhibition is Monkman’s first museum survey in the United States. Many of the paintings are large, complicated compositions with multiple figures.
John P. Lukavic, a curator at the Denver museum who heads the native arts department, said that Monkman’s work “gets right to the point” and explores important issues such as the disproportional rates of incarceration and institutionalization of Indigenous people.
Monkman, who grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, now splits time between Toronto and New York. This conversation, which has been edited and condensed, took place in his Manhattan studio.
How present was Cree culture in your childhood?
My dad grew up living a traditional lifestyle. He was Cree and grew up fishing on Lake Winnipeg and had a dog team. He was also a bush pilot. Part of my childhood was flying with my dad up north; he took people in and out of reserves. It was pretty cool.
Were you always drawing?
Mom was a teacher. We didn’t have a lot of money, so paper and crayons were the cheapest form of entertainment. I was one of those precocious kids saying, “Look what I did.” I was fortunate that in high school, I had a drafting teacher and an art teacher who said, “You should become an illustrator.”
The first couple of years out of Sheridan College in Ontario, I did storyboards for an ad agency, and that was great. Pure ideation to paper, really fast. I did thousands and thousands of drawings. Drawing became second nature.
Once you started painting for yourself, what direction did you go?
I completely rejected all representational image-making at that point, because I thought real artists make abstract paintings. This was the mid- to late ’80s. And I was an abstract painter until the late ’90s.
How did those works look?
I used the syllabics of the Cree language, which functioned as the surface layer, and submerged below that were shapes that referenced entangled bodies. It was a way to talk about colonized sexuality.
Why did you change styles so dramatically?
I spent 10 years trying to find my mark, and I found it. I was really proud of them. I still have them all — because nobody bought them. When I showed them, people scratched their heads or wanted to buy them to go with their couch, horror of horrors.
So audience feedback was the core of it?
It was a desire to communicate. I was making art because I wanted to say something, and if people aren’t understanding or reading what I’m saying, I’m failing. I thought, “Now I’m going to disappear my hand and go into stealth mode.”
What was the trick to making crowded and grand history paintings?
It was a humbling moment when I realized how difficult it is to actually make this kind of work. But everything I did in those 10 years of abstract painting had been leading me toward a deep understanding of color, transparency and the alchemy of painting. All of those ingredients are still at play. Now I’ve added storytelling. I really felt it was a maturing moment as an artist.
You’re not the first to use painters of the past as a launching point.
When you really look at how old masters learn from each other, they were always trying to emulate each other — Delacroix was obsessed with Rubens, for instance. I love Delacroix. Rubens and Géricault I come back to a lot.
How did your process evolve?
I decided that I was going to embrace the old master atelier model of working with assistants. Behind me is a study for “Miss Chief’s Wet Dream” [a painting in the Denver show]. It’s partly inspired by “[The] Raft of the Medusa” [by Théodore Géricault] and also a treaty between the Iroquois and the Dutch that was symbolized by two vessels traveling in parallel. The European settlers are about to collide with this canoe of Indigenous characters. I’m interested in what happens when those cultures literally clash.
What was the breakthrough?
It was that painting that helped my studio figure out the process and the methodology for making large paintings, which enabled us to take the Met commission. I like big paintings. I like how that shifts your perception when you enter the world. So this represents the turning point where I said, “I can’t just make all these big paintings myself.”
We sometimes do two to three painted studies on our way to the larger version. I prefer to work out the complexity of the composition first as a pencil or charcoal drawing, because then the mistakes are easier to change. Once you commit to canvas, it’s a little more work.
What are the tools you use?
We’re painting from our own photos. We decided to use digital photography, and we got help with lighting and figured out how to pose models with costuming so we could get better source material.
How was Miss Chief born?
Miss Chief was created around 2003 because I needed this alter ego to live inside the work that could reverse the gaze and be a storyteller, to represent missing narratives. She is basically this legendary being that is stitched into Cree cosmology and lives in that universe with our other legendary beings. She’s our trickster character, a shape-shifter. In Indigenous mythologies, the trickster is often the creator.
How important is she to your work?
That was really how I was able to just grow my art project from those abstract Cree paintings — I found a language of painting that would be more understood by a much wider audience.
What does her nonbinary status signify?
She was created to talk about an empowered and traditional understanding of sexuality and gender identity that existed all throughout North America among Indigenous people. Gender-fluid people were revered.
Some of your newer works are set in the present. How do those serve your mission?
I have a new series called “The Knowledge Keepers.” These were paintings I wanted to make about our elders, who were put into the residential schools — sometimes called boarding schools — as children. [In 2010, the Canadian government officially apologized for the attempt to erase Indigenous cultures by isolating children in the schools.] These are to really celebrate the resilience of our elders for keeping their language despite these attempts to erase it. My grandmother was one of these little girls in the schools, and that impacted our family through intergenerational trauma. These paintings are to honor small acts of resilience.
One newer work, “Compositional Study for The Sparrow,” strikes me because it’s relatively empty, with a lone girl reaching out.
It was really to represent loneliness, the removal of children from their families. There were no parents or grandparents there. These were not welcoming environments for young Indigenous children. We took inspiration from Vermeer — the window and the light cascading in.
What does the light represent?
For me, this image speaks to hope. We’re still here. Our elders survived. They held the language. They became our heroes.
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