Native tongue

KISS OF LIFE Monkman's Icon for a New Empire reimagines Pygmalion and Galatea.

Toronto-based Kent Monkman is a triple threat—a Canadian, gay, Native American artist. And the way his work negotiates these identities has earned it a place in the new exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian, “Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World.” Like post-black, the term post-Indian suggests the hybrid nature of identity today, where categories such as race (or sexual orientation) are fluid, but are still needed to ensure that our museums and galleries aren’t filled only with the work of straight white men. To that end, Monkman’s paintings and photographs tweak historical depictions of Native Americans, redressing the founding myths of our continent.

“My work is a response to artists like George Catlin and Edward S. Curtis, who created frozen-in-time images of Native people,” Monkman says, referring to the famous 19th-century American painter and 20th-century American West photographer, respectively. “They refused to acknowledge the innovation and adaptability of our cultures and glossed over aspects of them that might have offended their audience—repressing information, for instance, about gender and sexual variance.”

In Monkman’s images, a brave in platform heels might chase a bare-assed cowboy on horseback in the midst of a buffalo stampede, or a chief in a floor-length pink breechclout and feathered war bonnet might draw a pictogram of the paleface before him, naked save for Stetson and boots, tied to a tree, and pierced by arrows like Saint Sebastian. These mash-ups of genres—Hudson River School landscapes, 19th-century Western paintings, religious art, physique photos—might seem to come naturally to the artist, who was born in Ontario in 1965 to a Cree father and an Anglo-Irish mother.

“Firstly, I was drawn to appropriating the landscapes of this period as a way of metaphorically reclaiming the land,” he explains to TONY via cell phone, taking a break from installing a solo show in Winnipeg. “I realized that the sublime landscapes of [German-American painter Albert] Bierstadt and the Hudson River School were fitting scenes in which to explore alternate narratives.” Wanting to re-create these missing stories in art history, Monkman soon introduced the recurring figure of a tall, proud man in Native drag into his paintings. He named him, fittingly, “Miss Chief.”

“One of the angles I chose to challenge the subjectivity of these skewed 19th-century narratives was to examine the egos and career ambitions of the artists,” he says. “I decided to create an artist-persona who could speak to this, as well as address themes of colonized sexuality in Native North America.” Monkman modeled Miss Chief’s outfits after Cher circa “Half Breed”—a seminal moment in gender and cultural cross-dressing. Miss Chief turns the tables on history, strutting dandily where machismo once ruled and pursuing white men with amorous intent.

In “Remix,” a series of five photographs simulate vintage tintypes and depict the artist as his alter ego—in feathers, fringes and evening gowns. But the real showstopper is Icon for a New Empire (2007), a nine-foot-tall painting after Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Metropolitan Museum–held Pygmalion and Galatea. As in the original, the besotted sculptor plants a kiss on his marble creation, but, instead of a naked lady, the sculpture that turns to flesh under his touch is a mounted Indian modeled on The End of the Trail by James Earle Fraser, the widely reproduced image of a dejected Indian on his equally downcast pony. The mix of French academicism, Western American mythology and homosexual desire is a heady one, particularly in its ironic yet unembittered reversal of centuries of oppression and genocide.

The hopeful miscegenation in the painting flies in the face of attitudes held by the artist’s sources. “Catlin had contempt for Native people who reflected European influence, which he referred to as ‘contamination,’” Monkman explains. “This egregious underestimation of the ability of our cultures to adapt and incorporate other influences underscored notions of a dying race.” Native peoples, he notes, actually did this constantly; that’s how they survived. “My grandparents and great-grandparents never felt threatened,” he says. “They always knew they were Cree.”

“Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World” is at the National Museum of the American Indian through Sept 21.