History is Painted by the Victors
Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors
Denver Art Museum
100 W. 14th Avenue Parkway, Denver, CO 80204
April 20–August 17, 2025
Admission: Adults: $22-$30, Seniors, Students, Teachers, Active Military, and Veterans: $19-$27, Youth 18 and under and Members: free
Review by MG Bernard
“Those of you who are our relatives from across the oceans, when your ancestors came to our lands twenty generations ago, we cared for you… Now it is time for you to listen carefully to those who belong to the land.” [1]
Miss Chief Eagle Testickle
Before we begin this review, I would first like to give a land acknowledgement. [2] The land on which I, DARIA Art Magazine, and the Denver Art Museum (DAM) exist is the traditional territory of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples. I also recognize the forty-eight contemporary tribal nations that are historically tied to the lands that make up the state of Colorado. I operate within the context of the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ ancestral homelands and lifeways by the United States. We (the DAM, DARIA, and I) honor the contributions, knowledge, and history of the many Indigenous peoples who live on and have stewarded this land since time immemorial. Thank you.
An installation view of Kent Monkman’s (Fisher River Cree Nation) exhibition History is Painted by the Victors at the Denver Art Museum. Image courtesy of the museum.
History is Painted by the Victors, currently on view at the Denver Art Museum until August 17, 2025, is artist Kent Monkman’s (Fisher River Cree Nation, born 1965) first major solo exhibition in the United States. Co-organized with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibition focuses on Monkman’s deeply layered monumental paintings from the DAM’s extensive collection of the artist’s work alongside new works and loans from other institutions and private collections.
As the exhibition curator John Lukavic explains, “Through his painting, Monkman pushes forward an understanding of the lived experiences of Indigenous people today while confronting colonial injustices.” [3] Within an overarching theme of colonization’s attempted erasure of Indigeneity, the artist embeds his paintings with complex histories, communities, identities, and experiences to encourage close looking and critical thought.
Kent Monkman (Fisher River Cree Nation), video still from Casualties of Modernity, 2015, 14:20 minutes, color, English. Image courtesy of the artist.
Kent Monkman is one of my favorite performance artists. When I attended his conversation with the curator and walked through the exhibition, I was sad to see the absence of the artist’s performance works. [4] To be fair, I am myself a performance artist and I will always argue for its importance in the art world. Performance is an effective and affective tool of communication since it places the artist’s body directly in front of an audience.
There are two mentions of Monkman’s video works in the exhibition: 1) clips from his Dance to Miss Chief (2010) projected alongside citations of his newest book The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: Vol. 1; and 2) his 2015 video work Casualties of Modernity, where, in the guise of his alter ego, Miss Chief, Monkman tours a hospital as a sexy nurse “specializing in the treatment of conditions afflicting Modern and Contemporary Art.” [5] All in all, the artist’s practice spans almost every artistic medium I can think of, from video works to installation, sculpture to painting, sketch to performance, and photography to writing.
A view of Kent Monkman’s (Fisher River Cree Nation) Constellation of Knowledge, 2022, acrylic paint on canvas, 93 x 124 inches. Image courtesy of the museum.
Originally an abstract painter, Monkman discovered that viewers struggled to access the colonial narratives in his early work. In response, he let go of his personal work and his “artist’s hand”—he now employs a stable of studio assistants to help him paint his works—to make a decisive shift toward representational history painting. Through this more direct visual language, Monkman seduces Canadian and American audiences with familiarity: grand, beautiful, cinematic scenes recalling the “Old Masters.” Then, as viewers come closer, he twists the narrative to expose the violence of colonization.
History painting was first introduced in seventeenth-century Europe and features subjects drawn from classical history, mythology, and the Bible, which Monkman often references in his works. At the time of the French Revolution and beyond, the genre transformed from representing ancient history to current events such as Le Radeau de la Méduse (1818–1819) by French artist Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), depicting the fifteen survivors (out of 150 people) of a French ship after it ran aground off the coast of Mauritania in 1816.
Kent Monkman (Fisher River Cree Nation), Miss Chief's Wet Dream, 2018, acrylic paint on canvas, 144 x 288 inches. Collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Image courtesy of the artist.
Monkman reimagines Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa in Miss Chief’s Wet Dream (2018), filling the raft with European figures like Queen Victoria, a conquistador, and a puritan. Floating beside the raft, a canoe holds Indigenous figures who react to the survivors on the raft in various ways, including offering aid, reacting violently, and rowing away. In the center of the canoe the character of Miss Chief sleeps with an erection.
When artists like Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) came to the American West, they depicted beautiful landscapes void of human life—“untouched” lands free for the taking. At the heart of Monkman’s process is the interrogation of how visual histories—particularly those crafted through nineteenth-century Western painting—have authored and codified a colonial version of reality. Painters like Bierstadt were revered not only for their technical mastery but for how they reinforced ideologies such as Manifest Destiny. [6] Monkman, aware of this tradition, adopts and subverts these same methods to dismantle their ideological core and offer alternative, Indigenous-centered truths.
Kent Monkman (Fisher River Cree Nation), History is Painted by the Victors, 2013, acrylic paint on canvas, 72 x 113¼ x 1½ inches. Gift from Vicki and Kent Logan to the Collection of the Denver Art Museum, 2016.288. Image courtesy of the artist.
In his talk with Lukavic and in his essay “Altering Sight: Ideas in Motion,” Monkman explains how his artworks challenge dominant versions of history to teach viewers new ways of looking at history and history painting. Specifically, he confronts European and American “artists looking at [I]ndigenous art, [I]ndigenous people, [and] [I]ndigenous cultures” to reveal what these artists did not see and what they misrepresented. [7]
Most importantly, Monkman’s works ask viewers to think about the intersection of queer sexuality and Indigenous identity. Even though he hides his personal painterly mark, he still uses his own body to intercede the space between past and present, reminding audiences that before colonialism, Indigenous sexuality stood apart from the colonial binary of male and female genders. He does so by inserting his alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a play on the words “mischief,” “egotistical,” and “testicle,” into his monumental paintings, and thus, art history.
Kent Monkman (Fisher River Cree Nation), The Great Mystery, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 117½ x 91½ inches. Collection of the Hood Museum of Art. Image courtesy of the artist.
He not only reverses the gaze but fills in the once empty paintings by Thomas Cole (1801–1848)—founder of the Hudson River School—and Bierstadt, “which reinforced the idea that European Americans saw the West as a landscape devoid of [I]ndigenous people.” [8] It is these European and American ideals that also erased the berdache (a French term now considered derogatory that describes Indigenous individuals who take on the role of a third gender) and Two-Spirit roles from within Indigenous communities, which is the reason Miss Chief appears in the majority of Monkman’s works.
A view of Kent Monkman’s (Fisher River Cree Nation), mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People): Resurgence of the People, 2019, acrylic paint on canvas, 132 × 264 inches. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
Anthropologist Sabine Lang defines berdache and Two-Spirit roles as “manifestations of constructions of gender in Native American cultures that differ from Western ways of defining and constructing gender.” [9] She explains that through the Western, anthropological perspective, berdache roles in traditional American Indian cultures focused more on the importance of gender roles within the community rather than sexuality. In other words, “becoming a [Two-Spirit] male or female. . .was, and is, a matter of occupational preferences and personality traits, not of sexual orientation.” [10]
This is particularly evident in Monkman’s reworking of paintings by George Catlin (1796–1872) and Paul Kane (1810–1871)—artists who depicted Indigenous peoples through the lens of white superiority. Monkman meticulously researched these sources, even reading Catlin’s diary entries, which revealed his disgust at Indigenous customs, particularly his homophobic reactions to Two-Spirit traditions. In his works, Monkman doesn’t just critique these views, he reclaims them.
George Catlin, Dance to the Berdache – Saukie, 1861/1869, oil on card mounted on paperboard, 18.5 x 24.88 inches. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.
Catlin’s paintings of Indigenous peoples inspired Monkman to reproduce numerous artworks. A notable example is his Honour Dance (2020), a reimagining of Catlin’s scene Dance to the Berdache – Saukie (1861/1869), involving the honoring of a Two-Spirit individual. While Catlin framed the subject as “primitive,” Monkman restores the subject’s dignity and celebration, repositioning the Two-Spirit figure as central and revered.
In this painting, Monkman replaces Catlin’s berdache with Miss Chief, wearing her usual black pumps and striking a glamorous pose. The other individuals in the painting dance around her in general amusement and merriment. Unlike the figures in Catlin’s painting, who stare back at the artist and viewers, everyone in Monkman’s scene is entranced in their own movements around Miss Chief.
Kent Monkman (Fisher River Cree Nation), Honour Dance, 2020, acrylic paint on canvas, 60 x 94.25 inches. Image courtesy of WikiArt.
As the artist explains: “I wanted to counter Caitlin’s cultural religious prejudices.” Of the actual dance to the berdache in the Sac and Fox Nation that Catlin depicts in his painting, “he wrote that it was ‘one of the most disgusting and unaccountable things’ that he’d ever seen, and he ‘wished for it to be extinguished before it be more fully recorded’ (Letter no. 56, “Rock Island, Upper Mississippi,” in Caitlin 1989, 445).” [11]
In her essay “Various Kinds of Two-Spirit People: Gender Variance and Homosexuality in Native American Communities,” Lang reveals that in many cases today, the traditions of gender variance, such as Two-Spirit roles, have largely been forgotten or repressed. [12] And in the disciplines of anthropology and art history, hardly any attention has been paid to contemporary gay, lesbian, or Two-Spirit First Nations/Indigenous Peoples on and off the reservations. [13]
Kent Monkman (Fisher River Cree Nation), The Triumph of Mischief, 2007, acrylic paint on canvas, 84 × 132 inches. Image courtesy of WikiArt.
Monkman brings more awareness to contemporary Two-Spirit people through his paintings to fill the gaps that art history has failed to acknowledge. For instance, in The Triumph of Mischief (2007), Monkman rewrites and repaints art history to include Miss Chief, a contemporary Two-Spirit, to not only overturn European and American artists’ gaze on Indigenous peoples, like artists Catlin and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)—all of whom Monkman includes in the painting—but to expose these hidden histories erased by colonialism.
A detail view of Kent Monkman’s (Fisher River Cree Nation) The Triumph of Mischief, 2007, acrylic paint on canvas, 84 × 132 inches. Image by MG Bernard.
Within a vast landscape of the “American West” in The Triumph of Mischief, Monkman paints several tiny figures in a foreground filled with allusions to intertwined histories. Miss Chief—at center stage—wears only a pair of pumps and a pink shawl as she strolls through a wild and detailed scene of homoerotic imagery, violence, and debauchery. Indigenous peoples, trappers, and explorers, like Meriwether Lewis and William Clark circle around her.
Picasso, wearing a striped shirt, stands just to the right of Miss Chief, surrounded by Black men in poses reminiscent of the artist’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon from 1907. Catlin and Kane appear on the far right, wearing buckskin. Catlin stares at himself in a mirror. Monkman also includes figures from Indigenous culture and prophecy, including the white buffalo—the shapeshifter who gave the gift of seven sacred ceremonies to the Lakota people. [14]
Installation view of Monkman’s (Fisher River Cree Nation) Miss Chief’s Wet Dream, 2018, acrylic paint on canvas, 144 x 288 inches. Image by MG Bernard.
Kent Monkman’s works are emotional rollercoasters—humorous, tragic, seductive, and shocking. I could go on and on discussing the truly deeply layered concepts embedded in all his works, not just his paintings. There really is no conclusion when delving into Monkman’s practice. So, I urge you to make your own discoveries within his paintings and then seek out his work in other mediums to learn more about the attempted colonial erasure of his (and so many others’) Indigenous heritages.
MG Bernard (she/they) is a transmedia and performance artist, educator, advocate, and crip witch. Her practice finds itself at the intersection of performance art, transmedia installation art, art scholarship, art writing, curation, and activism.
[1] Quote taken from the title card exhibited next to Monkman’s Mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People): Welcoming the Newcomers, 2019.
[2] I borrowed and then altered this land acknowledgement from the nonprofit Femme Salée.
[3] Curatorial statement, “Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors,” Denver Art Museum, www.denverartmuseum.org/en/exhibitions/kent-monkman.
[4] In 2013, Monkman performed Casualties of Modernity at the Denver Art Museum in what is now the Learning and Engagement Center.
[5] Kent Monkman, Artist Statement for Casualties of Modernity (2015), www.kentmonkman.com/film/casualties-of-modernity1. Accessed May 19, 2025.
[6] Manifest Destiny was a nineteenth-century belief that the United States (i.e. colonizers, settlers, and European Americans) was destined by God to expand its dominion across North America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Monkman’s paintings also confront the ideology of Manifest Destiny, not only in content but in process. Notably, he discusses having to "erase his personal mark" from the canvas—an act that echoes the atelier model of collaborative painting used by European masters. This erasure raises unsettling questions: what does it mean for an Indigenous artist to mute his individuality to make work more legible to a predominantly white audience? Monkman sees this as a necessary compromise to be understood and to re-insert Indigenous stories into the grand visual tradition. But through the atelier’s collaborative process, he also challenges the myth of the solitary (usually white, male) genius. He works with models, lighting specialists, and painters, building a visual language that honors communal storytelling—a vital aspect of Indigenous tradition.
[7] Kent Monkman, “Altering Sight: Ideas in Motion," Art In Motion: Native American Explorations of Time, Place, and Thought, ed. John P. Lukavic and Laura Carusco (Denver and Norman: Denver Art Museum and University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 14.
[8] Ibid., 19.
[9] Sabine Lang, “Various Kinds of Two-Spirit People: Gender Variance and Homosexuality in Native American Communities," Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality, ed. Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 101.
[10] Ibid., 114.
[11] Monkman, “Altering Sight: Ideas in Motion,” 25.
[12] Sabine Lang, “Various Kinds of Two-Spirit People: Gender Variance and Homosexuality in Native American Communities," Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality, ed. Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 108.
[13] Ibid., 107.
[14] Shirley Madill, The Life & Work of Kent Monkman (Toronto: Art Canada Institute and University of Toronto, 2022), www.aci-iac.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Art-Canada-Institute_Kent-Monkman.pdf.
