Kent Monkman

In 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned two paintings from Monkman for its Great Hall, entitled "mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People)."

Monkman's work "convey[s] a deep understanding of oppression and the mechanisms at work in dominant ideology" by targeting modes of hierarchies and colonized sexuality within his artistic practice. Through his use of mimicry, Monkman subverts and de-centers the Western Gaze; he makes colonial audiences aware that "you've been looking at us [but] we've also been looking at you". In his paintings and performances he appropriates classical 19th-century landscapes, speaking to the appropriation and assimilation of Indigenous culture by colonial settlers. He targets both the Indigenous communities and Euro-American communities affected by colonialism, generally playing with role reversal to do so. Some of the binary topics he tackles are "artist and model, colonial explorer and colonized subject, gazer and gazed upon, male and female, straight and queer, past and present, real and imaginary".

Using Share as alter-ego, he is able to use his own subjectivity, and sexuality as a source of empowerment to deconstruct imperial historical constructs. Monkman reimagines representation and interpretation through his use of and reference to 19th century classical style painting by prolific artists still very much celebrated by their countries today, with their works continuing to reside within galleries and museums, even though they are wrongly representational, as they painted what white audiences at the time wanted "an imaginary Wild West filled with Indians playing Indian". These paintings by the likes of George Catlin and Paul Kane as well as the Group of Seven were meant for a European audience and advertised as "truth", since citizens from Europe were unable to travel at that time to North America themselves, "they took their paintings, portraits, mythologies and make-believe versions of the West to Europe, Asia, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere". He criticizes the work of Catlin and Kane as "an aesthetic method of colonial silencing since their representations of Native North Americans simplified the complexities of the communities, reducing their subjects to stereotypes, and modeling them according to the dominant narrative of colonization". Swanson argues that his work interrogates canonical images of Aboriginal peoples that "mythologized the 'dying' race of Red Men while propagating their own personas as heroic adventurers in a wild, undiscovered land".

His practise is imperative in initiating a discourse surrounding unjust representation within fine art, Miss Chief's version of history is no more fictional than that of the European painters who aided in creating a misleading historical image of the native perpetuating "the notion that Native North Americans hav[ing] vanished or become frozen in time, preserved in Euroamerican paintings", communicating to his audience the importance of assessing a piece of artwork critically as viewers, becoming aware of which gaze functions in its portrayal to its audience. He meshes Native North American and Western mythology together to create a hybridity of his own by using symbols such as cowboys or Ravens. A cowboy being a symbol known to many as an indicator of the West’s power.

In 2017, Monkman was presented the Bonham Centre Award from The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto, for his contributions to the advancement and education of issues around sexual identification. He also accepted the honorary title of grand marshal for Toronto's Pride parade that year, citing the importance of Canada's 150th anniversary and raising awareness to his work.

Monkman's work often references and reconfigures forms from 19th-century White American painters, particularly George Catlin and the Western landscape painters. For example, his 2006 "Trappers of Men" takes an 1868 landscape by Albert Bierstadt, but portrays the scene at midday – rejecting Bierstadt's sunset original – and replaces Bierstadt's animals with perplexed white individuals from American art and political history, a Lakota historian, and Monkman's two-spirited alter-ego.

Monkman was born in St. Marys, Ontario and raised primarily in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Monkman attended various Canadian and US institutions, including the Banff Centre, the Sundance Institute in Los Angeles, and the Canadian Screen Training Institute. He graduated from Oakville's Sheridan College in 1989 (Canadian Art). Monkman lives and works in Toronto, Ontario.

Kent Monkman (born 1965) is a Canadian First Nations artist of Cree ancestry. He is a member of the Fisher River band situated in the Interlake Region. He is both a visual as well as performance artist, working in a variety of media such as painting, film/video, and installation. He has had many solo exhibitions at museums and galleries in Canada, the United States, and Europe. He has achieved international recognition for his colourful and richly detailed combining of disparate genre conventions, and for his clever recasting of historical narrative.

Monkman adopts the Old Masters style of painting because he likes how the style expresses emotions like grief and longing through the body and facial expression. He was particularly moved by Antonio Gisbert's The Execution of Torrijos and his Companions at Málaga Beach (1888). On a project beginning in 2017, Monkman and his team began working on a "protesters series" based on the Standing Rock protests where they combined photographs from the protest with classic battle scene paintings. His team then had models pose for a photo shoot to remake and capture the classic style with modern subject; these photographs were then projected on large canvas, traced and base-painted by assistants before Monkman did his finishing touches.