Kent Monkman by
Artist Kent Monkman's all-encompassing project, Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, takes viewers on a journey through Canada's history, starting in the present and going back before Canadian confederation. Throughout the book there are clever albeit controversial commentaries told by Monkman's genderfluid, time-travelling, supernatural alter-ego Miss ChiefEagle Testickle. Her narratives takes viewers through the history of New France and the fur trade, the nineteenth-century dispossession of Indigenous lands through Canadian colonial policies, the horrors of the residential school system, and modern Indigenous experiences in urban environments. Shame and Prejudice challenges predominant narratives of Canadian history andhonours the resilience of Indigenous peoples. This book accompanies Monkman's largest solo exhibition to date, which is currently travelling across Canada at venues including the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the GlenbowMuseum in Calgary, and the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. The exhibition includes the artist's own paintings, drawings, and sculptural works, which form a dialogue with historical artefacts and artworks borrowed from museums and private collections across Canada. The book is trilingual with all text in English, French and Cree.
The Four Continents by
Bringing together the large-scale works that comprise Kent Monkman's suite of paintings entitled The Four Continents, a reworking of Tiepolo's Apollo and the Four Continents, this book explores the creation of these contemporary studies that address the original Eurocentric fantasies of "the other". Monkman's paintings, which are reproduced here in full with gatefolds, present a collation of tragic-comedic scenarios, resulting in mythical, graphic and satirical depictions, heavily influenced by the anti-colonial approach that Monkman takes in his work. The process of each painting that the artist has undertaken as part of the suite is illustrated throughout the book, in addition to texts from contributing writers that contextualise Monkman's work both within the confines of contemporary art, as well as the embedded sociological and political issues that are explored as part of this. Kent Monkman is a Canadian artist of Cree ancestry who works with a variety of mediums, including painting, film/video, performance, and installation. He has had solo exhibitions at numerous Canadian museums including the Montreal
Two-Spirit Acts by
In this collection of short but powerful two-spirit plays, characters dispel conventional notions of gender and sexuality while celebrating Indigenous understandings. With a refreshing spin, the plays touch on topics of desire, identity, and community as they humorously tackle the colonial misunderstandings of Indigenous people. From a female trickster story centred on erotic lesbian tales to the farcical story about a new nation of Indigenous people called the Nation of Mischief, this collection creates a space to explore what it means to be queer and Indigenous.