Kent Monkman (Fisher River Cree Nation), The Great Mystery, 2022. Acrylic paint on canvas, 117 1/2 × 91 1/2 in. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth: Purchased through the Miriam H. and S. Sidney Stoneman Acquisition Fund; 2023.18.1. © and image courtesy of Kent Monkman.
Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors is on view at the DAM through August 17. It is included with general admission, which is free for members and everyone 18 and under. The exhibition opens at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on September 27.
Miss Chief is a fierce provocateur who moves through time and space in Monkman’s work to disrupt false and incomplete narratives. She embodies Indigenous resilience and presents an empowering point of view of Indigenous gender and sexuality. Look for Miss Chief throughout the exhibition and learn more about her in the following, which is excerpted from the catalog that accompanies the exhibition:
To tell the histories and stories of the European colonization of Indigenous bodies, territories, knowledges, and minds in Canada and the United States, Monkman needed a narrator who could appear at any point in time and space to infuse Indigenous perspectives into art history and to disrupt false and incomplete narratives recorded and perpetuated by non-Indigenous artists.
Seeing how non-Native artists from the 1800s working in the American West, such as George Catlin and Paul Kane, would paint themselves into their own work—an act Monkman found egotistical—and wanting to engage these histories with camp, humor, and a healthy dose of mischief, a narrator was born: Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.
With a shrug of her shoulders and a wry smile, Miss Chief [in the painting The Great Mystery] shows humor is the best medicine for healing. After exploring the collection of Dartmouth College, Monkman found inspiration from an unlikely pair: Lilac and Orange over Ivory by Mark Rothko and Cyrus Dallin’s bronze sculpture Appeal to the Great Spirit. Monkman replaced the pensive warrior stereotype with a sardonic Miss Chief and turned Rothko’s abstraction into her landscape setting. Extending the spiritual contemplation of great mysteries that both of these works engage, Monkman attempts to distill the linearity and tropes of Indigenous-settler histories and asks how art might perpetuate and subvert them.
