Kent Monkman Painting Donated to Winnipeg Art Gallery

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Kent Monkman. "The Deposition," 2014

acrylic on canvas board. (Collections of the WAG. Gift of an anonymous donor, 2019-159)

A major painting, The Deposition, by Kent Monkman has been donated to the Winnipeg Art Gallery. It is featured in Monkman's touring solo show, Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, on view at the gallery until Feb. 9.

Donated anonymously, The Deposition is part of the Urban Res series, which sets themes relating to Indigenous experience past and present against contemporary urban backdrops populated with tattooed Renaissance angels, ancestors visiting from the spirit world and medicine men in beaded sports jerseys. 

In The Deposition, Monkman references the Modernists’ flattening of pictorial space and uses the figurations of Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon and Henry Moore to depict vulnerable Indigenous women as casualties of violence and disease.

“The last 150 years – the period of Modernity – represents the most devastating period for First Peoples, including the signing of the numbered treaties, the reserve system, genocidal policies of the residential schools, mass incarceration and urban squalor," says Monkman.

"My mission is to authorize Indigenous experience in the canon of art history that has heretofore erased us from view.”

Monkman created the work in his show in response to national celebrations surrounding Canada’s 150th anniversary, as a project for the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. 

Monkman, an internationally known artist of Cree ancestry based in Toronto, grew up in Winnipeg and took art classes at the gallery.

Source: Winnipeg Art Gallery