Kent Monkman. Officer and Laughing Girl / L'Officier et la jeune fille riant - Aimee Ng;Emma Hassencahl-Perley; Kent Monkman

This bilingual volume explores Cree Canadian artist Kent Monkman’s five-part reimagining of Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl through Monkman’s Two Spirit alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.

Kent Monkman is frequently inspired by museum collections, re-envisioning iconic works through a contemporary Indigenous lens, exploring themes of colonization, sexuality, loss, resilience—the complexities of historic and contemporary Indigenous experiences—across painting, film/video, performance, and installation. His gender-fluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, often appears in his work as a time-traveling, shapeshifting, supernatural being who reverses the colonial gaze to challenge received notions of history and Indigenous peoples.

In this English / Canadian French volume, Monkman, as Miss Chief, is seated across from a male figure in a room similar to the one in Vermeer’s iconic painting. Five paintings depict Miss Chief joined by a seventeenth-century Dutch officer, an eighteenth-century French explorer, a nineteenth-century American soldier, a twentieth-century Catholic priest, and a twenty-first tech executive, respectively.

Monkman’s artworks are held in the permanent collections of numerous institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Denver Art Museum; the Hirshhorn Museum; the Hood Museum of Art; the Heard Museum; and in Canada, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; the Glenbow Museum; the Art Gallery of Ontario; and macLYON in France. Private collections that house his works include Art Bridges; the Horseman Foundation; the Tia Collection, the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation; Forge Project; the Gochman Family Collection; the Sobey Art Foundation; and the Rob & Monique Sobey Foundation.