Kent Monkman

Kent Monkman, a Cree artist from Manitoba, paints monumental history paintings that take the visual language of nineteenth-century North American landscape — Bierstadt, Catlin, Kane — and reverses it. The colonial gaze is turned around. Indigenous figures occupy the foreground; settler bodies are in the distance; Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, Monkman’s recurring two-spirit alter ego, presides.

The 2019 commission for the Met’s Great Hall, *mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People)*, hung two twenty-foot canvases at the entrance to the museum and rewrote the iconography of arrival on the eastern seaboard. *The Scream*, painted earlier, treats the residential-school separations with the scale and seriousness usually reserved for European war painting.

He lives and works in Toronto, exhibits internationally, and is one of the working artists most directly forcing the canon to look back.