Kent Monkman: My name is Kent Monkman. I’m a Cree artist.
This is a very exciting opportunity to work with the collection at The Met, because at
this point in history, The Met is opening their doors to artists from different ethnicities
and perspectives to be able to reflect—at least as an Indigenous person—what this
colonial history has meant to us. As an artist, I wanted to bring Indigenous
experience into this canon of art history. My inspiration comes from a variety of different
sources. I’ll be looking at old paintings, I’ll be thinking about contemporary experiences.
I love the language of painting. How does a painter describe grief? How does a painter
describe ecstasy? How do they describe human emotion?
I really believe in the power of painting, and through the collaboration with my assistants
we developed a process to create compositions. From the initial pencil, we start to identify
who the characters are. We then moved into a photography stage; we brought models in
and created a photoshoot. We then moved to canvas. And then eventually it’s just me
left on the canvas by myself. That’s when I really pull everything all together.
And something I’ve been looking at in my art practice for many years are the paintings
or sculptures made by the settler artists who were looking at Indigenous people. And
it’s always this Romantic view of the “vanishing race.” In fact, we’re very much alive.
My work really is refuting those themes of disappearance.
There’s elements of camp in my work. There’s elements of Indigenous history. When I created
Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, I wanted an artistic persona that could travel through time to
reverse the gaze and look back at European settlers. That could really speak to Cree
values. We had our own ideas of gender and sexuality that didn’t fit the male-female
binary. Miss Chief is a legendary being. She really
embodies a sense of humor, a playfulness, a relationship to mythologies and history.
We have a lot of humor in our stories, and Miss Chief allows me to bring the humor even
through some very dark chapters of our experience. In the Emanuel Leutze painting Washington
Crossing the Delaware, he’s the hero of that painting. And I wanted Miss Chief to
be the hero of my two paintings. I wanted to make a monumental painting that really
reflected on Indigenous perspective to give it that same importance.
The title of this exhibition is mistikôsiwak (“the wooden boat people”), which is a
Cree word to describe when the French arrived, they arrived in wooden boats.
The two paintings together really speak about the arrivals and migrations and displacements
of people around the world. And the Great Hall, of course, is this place
of people entering and people leaving.
The left painting, Welcoming the Newcomers, Miss Chief is literally bending over to assist
people arriving to North America. That has to do with generosity.
In the second painting, Resurgence of the People, Miss Chief is commanding this boat,
which looks a lot like a migrant vessel, and many people across the world are being displaced
from their own lands. Miss Chief is leading this resurgence of the
people to represent a return to our languages and a return to our traditions.
I love the capacity for painting to tell a story.
I’ve always been drawn to history painting because so many Indigenous experiences were
never portrayed. This project was an opportunity to engage
with this master narrative, to reflect on it, and to offer perspectives that come from
the outside.