Bête Noire

Kent Monkman challenges the historical record, prying open what we thought was truth and making space for more complex narratives. Through his alter ego, the aptly named Miss Chief, Monkman takes us back to the time when perceptions of "the native" were formed, in an effort to upend the subservience of so-called primitive art in the development of modernism. Monkman began his career as a painter, both on canvas and in the theater, where he painted backdrops. Theatricality and character development have found their way into his work, which now Includes film, video, installation, new media, performance, painting, and Monkman came to public attention with large-scale, intricately detailed paintings that cite the iconic American landscapes of Hudson River School painters, particularly Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole, as well as the paintings and sketches of George Catlin and Paul Kane, both of whom strove to fully document Native nations across Canada and the United States. In Catlin's journals, Monkman found passing reference to the berdache, two-spirited men who traditionally took on women's roles in the community. Catlin found this power dynamics inherent in the development of modern-the natural sciences as well. His installation evokes the natural-history dioramas that became popular in the late1800s, first as a tool for science-staging animals in their natural habitat-and then, as a way to exhibit and view "other" cultures, particularly Indigenous cultures. Piercing both the birth of modernism and the birth of the natural sciences with the same irony-dipped arrow, Miss Chief also shoots dead the myth of the vanishing Indian under the first anthropole. In the large diorama Bête Noire, 2014, commissioned by SITE SANTA FE, Miss Chief takes center stage. The hand-painted backdrop makes reference to the iconic landscape of the North American plains, and the bull in the foreground, fatally pierced by Miss Chief's pink arrows, alludes to Pablo Picasso's Guernica, 1937. Picasso's cubism was partly inspired by the African masks and sculptures that he collected. Radically different from anything being made in Europe at the time, African objects became the basis of figurative abstraction. For Monkman, the appropriation of the visual production of other cultures without knowledge of its role and meaning remains a sticking point.
Text written by Curator Candice Hopkins for the exhibition catalog.