Throughout the 1800s and into the early 1900s, the paintings and photographs of non-Indigenous American and Canadian artists, including Albert Bierstadt, George Catlin, Edward S. Curtis and Paul Kane, shaped the North American consciousness of Indigenous peoples and western landscapes.
Their romantic depictions of luminous, uninhabited landscapes and stoic leaders served as billboards for western expansion, which violently dispossessed Indigenous Confederacies and Nations across Turtle Island (North America) through forced dispersals and widespread massacres.
Monkman subverts this unearned power by flipping the dynamics of visual authorship and symbolically reclaiming these landscapes for Indigenous peoples. He presents histories that reference Indigenous identities, experiences and truths.
While these histories challenge perspectives or reference injustices and discrimination, which can be unsettling, Monkman reminds us that art, creativity and even humour, can create new paths of understanding.
Variations on History Painting
In the mid- to late 1700s, many European and American artists responded to a growing interest in classical Greek and Roman art and culture. Academic painters developed the style of Neoclassicism to create monumental history paintings that depicted classical scenes and themes. While, at first glance, these paintings seem to focus on the past, they in fact have more to do with contemporary views about cultural values, superiority, political leanings and social dynamics.
Beginning in the 1800s, trailblazing artists in France and the United States turned history painting on its head by depicting current events on a monumental scale previously reserved for grand narratives of the past.
Some of these artists exemplified the Romantic movement’s emphasis on human emotion and imagination, while Realist painters depicted the lives of everyday people on a large scale. Monkman follows the paths forged by these artists and draws references from their paintings to illuminate contemporary lived experiences.
Kent Monkman (1965-), Sunday in the Park, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 182.9 x 243.8 cm. Collection of Belinda Stronach. © and image courtesy Kent Monkman
This idyllic scene of relaxation and community features elegant Indigenous kâ-wâsihkopayicik (Miss Chief’s term for her more “sparkly” friends) and evokes nineteenth-century artist Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86), a painting that shows people enjoying a park just west of Paris.
Here, Monkman reverses the quaint European picnic scene to emphasize that national parks, tourism hotspots and popular hunting grounds were, in fact, established on Indigenous homelands.
The scene starkly contrasts with the sweeping, uninhabited landscapes painted in the 1800s by non-Indigenous artists, such as Albert Bierstadt, whose works promoted westward expansion.
Re-creating a landscape imagined and painted by artist Albert Bierstadt in the 1800s, Monkman uses the scene as a backdrop for Miss Chief, who is shown here entertaining Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry Regiment he led. Soldiers swim, frolic and sunbathe, their poses referencing the nude young men in the paintings and photographs of nineteenth-century artist Thomas Eakins.
On her easel, we see a reference to Lakȟóta artist Red Horse’s drawing of the Battle of the Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn), where Indigenous warriors defeated and killed Custer. Monkman ultimately asks us to consider who writes history and whose perspectives are missing.
Kent Monkman (1965-), History Is Painted by the Victors, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 182.9 x 287.7 cm. Denver Art Museum, gift from Vicki and Kent Logan to the Collection of the Denver Art Museum. © Kent Monkman
View of the exhibition Kent Monkman: History Is Painted by the Victors. © Kent Monkman. Photo MMFA, Jean-François Brière
