Cree artist Kent Monkman is a contemporary old master most celebrated for his reworking of figurative painting. Now in his 60th year, Monkman’s gut-wrenching recastings of images drawn from the western canon are produced by his atelier, a studio modelled on a longstanding tradition of the artist as chef d'atelier.
His 2019 completion of the commission mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s (the Met) Great Hall marked the first of three institutional plays by the Met for social relevancy. Monkman, along with African-American contemporary artist Jacolby Satterwhite and Taiwanese calligrapher Tong Yang-Tze, each transformed the vast temple-like lobby into a gathering place for cross-cultural dialogue.
Six years later, Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors, a major retrospective currently on view at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, positioned mistikôsiwak as the height of Monkman’s boundary-breaking practice and stratospheric rise to the upper echelons of the contemporary international art world.
