Exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts features simplistic critiques of westerners, while portraying the artist as a god-like cross-dresser

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Canada’s museums have transformed themselves in the last decade, adopting identity-driven makeovers under pressure from the Trudeau-led Liberals. National Post visited institutions from coast to coast to survey the damage and consider its implications. Today, Terry Newman visits the Montreal Museum of Fine Art to view the controversial, gender-bending work of painter Kent Monkman.

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Winnipeg Cree artist Kent Monkman’s exhibition, “History is Painted by the Victors,” is now on display at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It features 20 paintings that have been rightly called “racy,” “violent,” “radical,” “topical,” “lurid” and “melodramatic.”

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What critics seemed to have missed, however, are the paintings’ simplistic critique of westerners, their portrayal of Monkman as a lurid, god-like character, able to magically reveal what he appears to believe are the hidden alternative sexual appetites of men, as well as the incoherencies in Monkman’s claim that he rejects the idea of the western solitary artist.

Monkman is known for inserting his alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, into imitations of other historical pieces in order to “reverse the colonial gaze.”

The exhibit begins with “content guidance,” telling those who are about to enter that it features “acts of resistance, bodily violence by authority figures, environmental exploitation, frolicking and leisure, loss and grieving, love and compassion, mischief and humour, nudity from across the gender spectrum, queer visibility and pride, and resilience.” It ends by telling visitors that the exhibit also features a “space for reflection,” should they need it.

Attendees are told that “Miss Chief,” Monkman’s alias and likeness, is a “fierce provocatrix who moves through time and space” in Monkman’s works to “disrupt false and incomplete narratives,” and presents “an empowering point of view of Indigenous gender and sexuality.” Viewers are told to look for Miss Chief throughout the exhibit, but Monkman’s caricature isn’t hard to find. Ironically, the same intro says that “Miss Chief” found the tendency of non-Indigenous painters in the 1800s inserting themselves into their work to be “egotistical.”

The paintings certainly reflect........

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