Kent Monkman: History Is Painted by the Victors

The renowned Cree artist unmasks a whitewashed, Eurocentric history through provocative paintings full of sexuality and drama

One of Canada’s most renowned artists, interdisciplinary Cree artist Kent Monkman challenges the art historical narrative of settler cultures that colonized First Peoples from North America. He incorporates influences from the canon of European and Euro-American painting, reframing historical, contemporary and speculative future Indigenous experiences. Taking inspiration from Western artists such as George Catlin, as well as from the Old Masters, Monkman’s monumental history paintings feature white colonizers in violent conflict with Indigenous people. The depictions range from early colonial encounters to modern and contemporary clashes between Indigenous communities and uniformed police or clergy. In borrowing the visual language of his oppressors, Monkman reclaims the narrative written by Western art history about the brutalization and cultural genocide carried out against Indigenous North American communities.
History is Painted by the Victors accompanies the artist’s first major exhibition in the United States. The catalog gathers rich analysis of Monkman’s art from prominent scholars, expanding our understanding of his oeuvre and offering new insight via queer theory, historical and contemporary contexts, visual analysis and lived experience.
Kent Monkman was born in 1965 in Ontario, Canada and is a member of Fisher River Cree First Nation in Treaty 5 Territory. Monkman’s works have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Hayward Gallery, Philbrook Museum of Art, Palais de Tokyo and many more. He is the author of two bestselling novels, The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, Volumes 1 and 2, which are based on his gender-fluid alter ego who often appears in Monkman’s work as a time-traveling, shape-shifting, supernatural being who reverses the colonial gaze to challenge received notions of history and Indigenous peoples. He lives and works in New York City and Toronto.

This book was published in conjunction with Denver Art Museum; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts