Kent Monkman is a Cree artist from Canada who is multi-disciplinary in his practice as a painter, filmmaker, and performance artist. Monkman studied the paintings of celebrated Euro-American, male artists such as George Catlin, Karl Bodmer, and the photographer Edward Curtis, to only name a few, whom endeavored to capture the American West and the indigenous peoples that inhabited the region. As a response to their authoritative depictions, Monkman inserts a female persona known as “Miss Chief Eagle Testickle” (a play on the words “mischief” and “egotistical”) in order to turn the gaze around and critique the process of empire inherent in those works of the 19th century. Monkman’s interrogation of landscape paintings and portraiture produced during that time reveals the brutal colonization of the Americas, its indigenous peoples, and the lasting, traumatic effects on contemporary First Nations and Native American communities. Additionally, recent publications concerning “two-spiritedness” and queer theory will be utilized as a mode of reading Monkman’s work to explore connections between imperial narratives and the racialized and gendered Indigenous body.

About Shanna Ketchum Heap of Birds:

Shanna Ketchum-Heap of Birds is from the Diné/Navajo Nation and a PhD candidate at Middlesex University London. Her research areas include contemporary Native-American visual art, theater, and performance studies. She lectures both nationally and internationally and her work was recently published in Beyond Failure: New Essays on the Cultural History of Failure in Theatre and Performance (Routledge), Artforum International and Wired Italia. Recent lectures were at Artists Space in NYC, the Walker Art Center and Nanyang University in Singapore.