Go inside Kent Monkman's new ROM exhibition, a corrective to your childhood museum field trips

If he's not the most famous artist working in Canada today, then at the very least, Kent Monkman is building a career for the history books. And history, as it happens, is often the target in his sights.

A member of Fisher River Cree Nation, Monkman's work is especially interested in flipping the colonial gaze, so to speak, painting Indigenous figures into classical scenes where their presence was conspicuously absent. Through performance, installation, video and painting, he's redrawn Canadian history, and he's done so to acclaim, exhibiting his work around the world, including a special commission for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019.

Monkman's latest project is Being Legendary, an all new exhibition that opened last weekend at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. To create the show, the acclaimed Cree artist was given access to the museum's extensive collection, pulling beaded moccasins and even dinosaur bones items that appear alongside 35 paintings and other works.

Assembled, they tell a history of the planet from an Indigenous point of view, namely that of Monkman's alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a genderfluid time traveller with a Bob Mackie wardrobe.

Upon entering the exhibition, text (by the artist's long-time collaborator Gisle Gordon) signals the show's intent: "to challenge the histories we've been told and more broadly, amplify Indigenous knowledges and experiences that often go ignored in lands now known as Canada."

On Thursday's episode of Q, Monkman spoke at length about the ideas that drove the project. But what will visitors find when they pay a visit to ROM? Here are a few of the highlights.

The origin of the universe (and Miss Chief Eagle Testickle)

Upon entering the exhibition's third floor gallery, patrons will find two grand acrylic paintings suggesting the creation of the show's celestial narrator. In the beginning, there was Miss Chief, and in one painting (I Come From pkwan ksik, the Hole in the Sky), she floats in the heavens, stiletto heels piercing the gauzy pastel firmament. Soaring beyond her, winged rainbow dinosaurs form a tableau that's been ripped from the Sistine Chapel. It's The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Plants: Pteranodon Remix.

Who is Miss Chief?

With a name that's literally pronounced "mischief," you bet Monkman's alter ego has a sense of humour, and it's a subject he briefly touched on during his interview with Q. As he says on the program, Miss Chief's presence has proven helpful over the years as a storytelling tool, delivering hard truths about colonial history with a sequinned glove. She's been part of Monkman's career since the early 2000s, appearing in performance and video works in addition to his paintings. Oftentimes, she pops up as a sort of witness to history, and Being Legendary certainly isn't the first instance where Miss Chief has served as a sort of immortal museum docent.

She was the narrator of Shame and Prejudice, to cite one recent example. That's the name of a Monkman exhibition that toured Canada extensively after its 2017 debut at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

Around the time of its opening, Monkman spoke with CBC Indigenous and explained Miss Chief's role in his work. "[She's] a female spirit that counters the very male, patriarchal European colonized viewpoint," he said. "I wanted people to understand that as much as the Europeans were looking at Indigenous people, Indigenous people have always been looking at Europeans as well." (Read that interview.)

Beyond her role as a witness, Miss Chief's sheer presence is a reminder that history isn't a singular objective truth. It has its authors, and if Monkman can add platform shoes to a prehistoric landscape, what sort of artistic license is going on in the colonial version of events, including the images we've preserved and celebrated at institutions like the ROM?

In 2016, Monkman appeared on CBC Radio's Writers and Company and talked about the origins of Miss Chief. "Creating Miss Chief was a strategy to, again, challenge the subjectivity of the artists in the 19th century, like George Catlin, John Mix Stanley, various others who were painting themselves in their own work. And it was a way of challenging the subjectivity of the work by saying, 'OK, this is an artist with his own creative license who's painting himself in his work.'"

"It was also about the ego of the artist, to promote themselves, to have such a strong position."

"I wanted my alter ego to be front-and-centre in a very aggressive way to reverse the gaze as a First Nations artist that could appear to live in that time period and be the observer of European settler cultures. So she has proven to be an effective way of disrupting this historical narrative the dominant narrative that we've received through art history and through the telling of history."

Listen to Kent Monkman on Writers and Company.

Writers and Company52:38Kent Monkmans subversive art creates a counter-narrative of Indigenous experience

When dinosaurs (among other things) ruled the Earth

But back to those angelic pteranodons for a moment, the ones with glutes worthy of Michelangelo. They're not the only prehistoric creatures that appear in Being Legendary, and fossils serve as one of the exhibition's more fantastical points of inspiration.

"All these kids coming here [to ROM], they're fascinated with the dinosaurs," Monkman told Q. "But knowing that these fossils have been extracted from Indigenous lands got me really thinking, well, what have Indigenous children been taught about these ancient creatures?"

Paintings and etchings plus a sculptural "fossilized record" of Miss Chief's platform shoe appear in one of the galleries, a room with a bird's eye view of a beloved museum attraction: the Barosaurus skeleton that looms over the ROM lobby.

In this painting, Battle of the piysiwak and the misipisiwak, 2D drawings fly with fully realized dinosaurs.

On Q, Monkman explained that he was inspired to trace a link between dinosaur fossils and the petroglyph motifs drawn by Indigenous cultures. Images of Thunderbirds, for example, reminded him of pteranodons or pterodactyls.

"Could these stories have come from the fossils of these giant winged creatures?" he said on Q. "In the exhibition, I'm sort of playing with this visual knowledge, this visual culture that exists, and saying, 'Look, our stories of these mythical beings, have they grown out of our observation of these fossils?"

An 'interruption of knowledge'

Kids come to the ROM for more than the dinosaurs, though, and no matter where you grew up in this country, museum field trips are a highlight of the elementary-school experience.

Monkman was raised in Winnipeg back in the 1970s. In a 2016 episode of Writer's and Company, he shared his memories of childhood visits to the Manitoba Museum, and the life-size dioramas that dazzled him at the time ones depicting Indigenous life, pre-contact, specifically.

"There's a bison hunt that's as realistic as you can get in terms of a museum diorama. It was inspiring to see this idyllic representation of First Nations cultures. But you would step outside the museum and there on Main Street was Skid Row. You have the fallout of colonization and people that have been damaged through colonization."

"I remember my classmates would ask me, 'What happened to your people?' because I was First Nations, and I just could not answer that question. I didn't have the language."

"I didn't know how to reconcile what was in the museum and what had happened and what was on the streets of Winnipeg at that time."

As Monkman told Q, he's spent years piecing the answers together through art. "And that came through learning about the far-reaching impact of the colonial project and how devastating it has been," he said on the show.

Museum exhibits about theresidential school experience didn't exist when he was a kid. In fact, the ROM doesn't have any materials addressing that chapter of history; Monkman told Q that he made that discovery when working on Being Legendary.

On that front, his new exhibition makes a nod to the informational gap. Being Legendary points to the consequences of the residential school system, and the "interruption of knowledge" that was caused by colonization.

On Q, he highlighted this series of paintings, which appear alongside moccasins from the museum's collection: hand-beaded works by "once known" artists.

Another painting appears in the same room, a scene that references the 1885 Hangings of Battleford. As Monkman told Q, it's considered to be the largest mass execution in Canadian history.

The moccasins in the paintings represent the lives of the eight Indigenous men who died, Monkman explained on Q, and the shoes are surrounded by tiny figures in mourning Mmkwsiwak, the little folk of Cree legends. Blossoming plants spring forth in each scene.

"You can't kill spirit. That spirit is there," Monkman told Q. "I think that was my way of sort of transcending and kind of making this into a more hopeful series of paintings."

Tributes to Indigenous leaders

The final section of the exhibition carries that hope into the present. In a series of portraits (Shining Stars), Monkman pays tribute to Indigenous people who are doing work that he admires: artists, academics, activists and knowledge keepers.

"This series of portraits grew out of the conversation that was happening a few years ago about monuments to colonial leaders," Monkman told Q. "[Former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission] Murray Sinclair said, you know, let's not attract more hatred from Canadians by tearing down the monuments to their leaders. Let's just build our monuments. Let's create monuments to our own leaders."

Like many of the other works in the exhibition, the portraits are reminiscent of European paintings from another era. One subject, Cree elder and educator Pauline Shirt, is even depicted on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre, playing her drum beneath its gilt arches. (As Monkman explained on Q, Shirt selected the setting because of her love of music.)

Why reference historical paintings?

Monkman frequently mines Western art history in his work. In 2017, for example, he gave CBC Arts an early look at a painting he would unveil at the Art Gallery of Ontario. In a video tour, he unpacked the references at play in that work, a 24-foot-long scene entitled Two Ships.

Watch that video.

Two years later, Monkman debuted an even more notable museum commission, a diptych of monumental paintings created for the Metropolitan Museum of Artin New York. One of the panels is a riff on Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware. In it, Miss Chief leads the charge, subbing in for the very first POTUS. CBC News interviewed Monkman about the project in late 2019, and he explained why he mimics historical styles of Western painting throughout his work.

"What I'm trying to do is to authorize Indigenous experience, both historic and contemporary, into this canon of art history. We've been erased from the art history of this continent. The settler artists that came here, they had their own vision of this continent, which was essentially an empty landscape," he said.

"Here's this incredible genre of painting that has been discarded. Yet it holds so much potential to tell stories that relate to where we are today specifically Indigenous stories that have never been authorized into paintings like this."

Watch that interview.

Kent Monkman 'reverses the colonial gaze' with new paintings at the Met

5 years ago

Duration 3:29

Why does he work with museums?

At the end of his time on Q, Monkman expressed why he continues to collaborate with major collecting institutions. "I know some Indigenous people say, well, let's just create our own thing," said Monkman.

"The problem with that is you're going to leave these museums unchecked," he said, adding that museums still hold great power as keepers of the "dominant narrative."

"You're going to leave the bully still bullying, still lying, still leading people towards ignorance. So my volunteer work is working with museums to shift that narrative to help museums shift from the inside out," he said.

"I imagine myself as a kid and seeing a completely different narrative coming forward, how that would have changed my life."

Hear the complete interview with Kent Monkman on Q.

Kent Monkman. Being Legendary. To March 19, 2023 at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. www.rom.on.ca