The Met Acquires Two Paintings by Kent Monkman

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has acquired a grand diptych by Kent Monkman, mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People), created by the Ontario-based Cree artist as the inaugural commission for a new series of contemporary projects in the museum's Great Hall.

The paintings – titled Welcoming the Newcomers and Resurgence of the People – debuted in December 2019 and will remain on view in that space until Nov. 16.

The works were acquired with the support of the Donald R. Sobey Foundation, CAF Canada Project. CAF Canada (Charities Aid Foundation of Canada) is a registered Canadian charity that the works to help donors make strategic and focused philanthropic decisions. 

"As The Met recommits itself to attending more rigorously to underrepresented voices, Monkman's commission functions as both a trenchant reminder and a steadfast compass going forward," said the museum's director, Max Hollein. 

"With monumental scale and breadth, and at a critical moment of reckoning, mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) upends conventional historical narratives of the European settlement of North America. The diptych conveys Monkman's reverence for art history's traditional canon even as he critiques it by calling necessary, incisive attention to its gaping omissions." 

Sheena Wagstaff, the museum's Leonard A. Lauder chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art, praised Monkman's ability to walk between serious subject matter and camp through his alter-ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.

"Monkman's grand commission delivers a powerful – and visually spectacular – corrective to widespread, even systematic erasure of Indigenous lives, perspectives and experiences from art history and museum collections,"  Wagstaff said.

"Like so many of the European and American history paintings he deftly references, mistikôsiwak is operatic in both scale and content, filled with pain and misery, but also joy and triumph in equal measure."

Donald R. Sobey, chair of the Donald R. Sobey Foundation, said Monkman's "triumphant response" to continental questions generations in the making will continue to provoke more meaningful discussion on the enduring issues.

Like much of Monkman's work, the two paintings reinterpret images, motifs and techniques from art history to assert Indigenous experiences and histories, while also bringing present-day issues to the fore.

They feature numerous references to works in the museum's collection, particularly paintings and sculptures that promote the 19th-century romantic myth of the "vanishing race."  

Welcoming the Newcomers captures the early stages of European colonization while asserting the injurious aspects of these encounters, including the onset of disease, religious oppression and the proliferation of trans-Atlantic slavery.

Resurgence of the People recalls recent poignant images of precarious but heroic migrant vessels, testifying to the resilience of Indigenous peoples in the face of systemic white supremacy and climate change.

Prominent in each composition is the larger-than-life figure of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, who embodies Two Spirit traditions of various Indigenous communities embracing non-binary gender and plural sexualities.

Miss Chief, whose name plays on the words mischief and egotistical, parallels the Cree trickster figure who challenges conventional beliefs and wisdom in traditional stories.

Monkman's work is also in the collections of the the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Denver Art Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. 

His work has been exhibited at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Oklahoma, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the Hayward Gallery in London and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

Monkman has had two nationally touring solo exhibitions – Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience (2017-2020) and The Triumph of Mischief (2007-2010). 

Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art