Description
This bilingual volume explores Cree Canadian artist Kent Monkman’s five-part reimagining of Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl, through Monkman’s Two Spirit alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.
Monkman is frequently inspired by museum collections, re-envisioning iconic works through a contemporary Indigenous lens. He explores themes of colonization, sexuality, loss and resilience—the complexities of historic and contemporary Indigenous experiences—across painting, film / video, performance and installation. His genderfluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, often appears in his work as a time-traveling, shapeshifting, supernatural being who reverses the colonial gaze to challenge received notions of history and Indigenous peoples.
In this English / Canadian French volume, Monkman, as Miss Chief, is seated in his paintings across from a male figure in a room similar to the one in Vermeer’s iconic Officer and Laughing Girl. The five paintings depict Miss Chief joined variously by a 17th-century Dutch officer, an 18th-century French explorer, a 19th-century American soldier, a 20th-century Catholic priest and a 21st-century tech executive.
Author biographies
Emma Hassencahl-Perley, a Wolastoqey artist and educator from Neqotkuk (Tobique First Nation), is curator of Indigenous Art at Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
Kent Monkman is an interdisciplinary Cree visual artist and a member of ocêkwi sîpiy (Fisher River Cree Nation) in Treaty 5 Territory, Manitoba, Canada
Aimee Ng is Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, The Frick Collection, New York
Table of Contents
- Directors’ Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Points of Departure: Vermeer’s World / Points de depart: Le monde de Vermeer by Aimee Ng
- Kent Monkman: Officer and Laughing Girl Revisited by Emma Hassencahl-Perley
- Extract from Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle by Kent Monkman
- Catalogue
- Bibliography
- Index
- Photo Credits
