Kent Monkman History Is Painted by the Victors
In the grand, marbled halls of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, history is undergoing a glorious rupture. Not quietly, nor meekly, but with a riot of oil paint, high camp, and impossible high heels. Kent Monkman’s landmark retrospective, History Is Painted by the Victors, is not simply a collection of paintings—it is an audacious reclamation of history's canvas, a lyrical and blistering correction to centuries of colonial erasure. Here, Indigenous bodies and queer desire are not footnotes—they are the epicenter.
Curated by Léuli Eshrāghi (Curator of Indigenous Practices at the MMFA) and John Lukavic (Denver Art Museum), this Canadian premiere gathers nearly 40 colossal canvases, including pivotal works like The Scream, Resurgence of the People, The Prophecy, and Victory for the Water Protectors. Each is an aesthetic blitzkrieg—a visual insurgency of dazzling technique, historical gravitas, and theatrical wit.
Baroque Bombast Meets Political Reinscription
Monkman, a Fisher River Cree artist and self-identified Two-Spirit queer person, is not simply working within the Western tradition of history painting—he’s detonating it from the inside. Trained in and enthralled by the neoclassical drama of 18th- and 19th-century European painting, Monkman mimics its bravura—the billowing drapery, the overripe skies, the chiaroscuro machismo—and lards it with irony and Indigenous subversion.
He does this most powerfully through his alter ego: Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a bejeweled, bare-chested, gender-fluid provocateur in scarlet stilettos. She wanders into scenes once reserved for noble conquerors and colonialists, unsettling and reauthorizing them. She isn’t just a character; she’s a trickster spirit with a paintbrush and a mission—delivering eros and indignation in equal measure.
In Resurgence of the People (2019), Miss Chief helms an ark-like vessel crammed with Indigenous figures, paddling through a storm-tossed sea as military and police specters look on from a barren shore. The allegory is clear and searing: salvation lies not in Western institutions, but in communal resilience. Rendered in operatic scale, the painting envelops the viewer physically and psychically. One does not look at Monkman's paintings—one is engulfed by them.
 |
| From left to right: Stéphane Aquin, Museum Director: Léuli Eshrāghi, Curator of Indigenous Practices at the MMFA: Kent Monkman |
Recasting Martyrdom, Reimagining Resistance
Many viewers will find themselves breathless before The Scream (2017), a wrenching tableau that captures the state-sanctioned abduction of Indigenous children into residential schools. RCMP officers, stoic and faceless, drag crying children from their mothers. The emotional weight is unbearable—but it’s also vital. Monkman is not interested in tasteful outrage. He insists on reckoning.
Elsewhere, in Victory for the Water Protectors, he transforms 21st-century Indigenous activists—those resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline—into mythic defenders of the land. Painted in the heroic mode of Napoleonic war scenes, these portraits of resistance are not just commemorative; they are revolutionary. “I wanted to valorize these people as the true heroes of our time,” Monkman has said. And so he does, borrowing the grandeur of art history to uplift those history would rather forget.
 |
| When you walk through the different rooms, you will be taken aback by the size, the colors, the details of his exquisite paintings. |
Camp as Critique: When Humor Disarms Power
But Monkman is never just elegiac. He is also deliciously mischievous. In The Prophecy (2021), Miss Chief elopes with an RCMP officer outside a suburban bungalow, their shadows morphing into ancestral petroglyphs. The image is ludicrous, tender, and deeply pointed. It collapses centuries of history into a single kiss, subverting power with affection, and violence with absurdity.
Satirical works like Bacchanal and Saturnalia
Monkman channels the spirit of Cree storytelling—sexy, humorous, alive with contradictions—and elevates it to the status of canonical art. There’s a bawdy joke in every brushstroke, but also a painful knowledge: that laughter is survival, and that irreverence can be a political act.
 |
| It is fascinating how Kent Monkman can seamlessly blend well known artistic style in his otherwise figurative works, |
A Cathedral of Corrections
Walking through the exhibition is like entering a vast cathedral of historical revisionism. But instead of saints and martyrs, the stained-glass palette honors the stolen, the defiant, the erased. History Is Painted by the Victors does not merely place Indigenous and queer figures into Western art—it re-centers the entire historical apparatus around them.
Monkman’s work is at once cinematic and scholarly, dazzling and didactic. He references Jacques-Louis David as fluently as he channels Cree cosmology. The compositions are academically tight—no detail is accidental—but the emotions they evoke are raw, destabilizing, and human. The paintings demand slow, reverent attention, yet they also provoke spontaneous reactions: gasps, laughter, tears.
Critique and Complication
Still, some critics may question whether the monumental aesthetic risks overwhelming its own message. Does the polish of oil painting render pain too beautiful? Do the campy tableaux risk caricature, reducing Indigenous suffering to tableau vivant?
These are fair interrogations—but perhaps also beside the point. Monkman is not offering clean answers or static identity politics. His work thrives in ambivalence—where satire and sincerity cohabitate, where trauma is narrated through burlesque, and where beauty is weaponized for reclamation.
Indeed, Monkman’s paintings inhabit that uncomfortable zone where art doesn’t soothe—it confronts. His canvases are battlefields of imagery, wresting power from centuries of exclusion with brushstrokes that are as elegant as they are insurgent.
 |
| Kent Monkman |
Beyond the Canvas
The MMFA has wisely framed the exhibition within a broader cultural matrix, featuring readings, operatic performances, and short films. Particularly exciting are scenes from Monkman’s opera-in-progress, The Miss Chief Cycle, staged at Bourgie Hall with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. It’s an expansion of his painterly world into music and performance—testament to the artist’s multimedia ambition.
Equally resonant is the scheduled performance by Alanis Obomsawin and Jeremy Dutcher—two generational voices who, like Monkman, use art as a form of ancestral dialogue and cultural resistance.
A Nation’s Memory Rewritten in Rouge
“History is Painted by the Victors,” Monkman reminds us, and so he paints a different history—one that swells with memory, outrage, sexuality, and healing. His brush is equal parts scalpel and torch: dissecting the distortions of colonial myth-making while igniting new visions of pride and defiance.
The MMFA’s decision to host this retrospective marks a historic first: its most ambitious solo show dedicated to a living Indigenous artist. In doing so, the museum isn’t just celebrating Monkman—it is challenging its own walls, past, and patronage.
This is not merely an art exhibition. It’s a cultural redress. It is the past reimagined, the present recalibrated, and the future spoken in a visual language that is at once baroque, bawdy, and breathtakingly brave.
Kent Monkman’s revolution may be painted in oils—but its impact is indelible.
Kent Monkman: History Is Painted by the Victors
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
On view: September 27, 2025 – March 8, 2026
For tickets and full programming: mbam.qc.ca
No comments:
Post a Comment