VULTURE MAGAZINE
By Jarrett Earnest
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| There are two paintings. In the first, we see settlers arriving on the shores of North America and being welcomed by the First People. Miss Chief is there, helping people ashore. For the second painting, Miss Chief is in a boat, posed like Washington Crossing the Delaware, along with a variety of indigenous people piloting this boat through a stormy sea. |
Isn’t a time-traveling, gender-fluid, indigenous sex goddess exactly what art needs right about now?
The Met seems to think so and has commissioned the Canadian Cree artist
Kent Monkman, whose work often features his alter ego,
Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, to produce a pair of 11-by-22-foot paintings titled mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) for
its Great Hall (opens December 19). Monkman, 54, gave up abstraction to communicate ideas about the history of colonial settlement in North America to a more mainstream audience, and somehow, as a result, he has become “about as famous as a living painter can be” in Canada (
according to The Globe and Mail). [
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