JACK TEEHAN | DATE 3/1/2026

Back in stock! ‘Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors’

Kent Monkman’s Compositional Study for The Sparrow (2022) is reproduced from History is Painted by the Victors, published to accompany the enormously popular traveling exhibition of the same name. On view through March 8 at the Musée des beaux-arts, Montréal, the largest solo exhibition of Monkman’s work to date reopens in April at the Akron Museum of Art. In it, the artist’s heroic tableaux reverse the imperialist gaze inherent to Eurocentric academic painting, while scenes of erotic, decolonial drama unfurl against backgrounds lifted from canonical landscape artists like Canada’s Group of Seven. The work animates peoples and communities across Turtle Island (North America) representing a wide variety of societal concerns, from the climate crisis and environmental protection to intergenerational trauma and the visual agency of Two-Spirit, Queer and transgender Indigenous communities. Featuring 86 color reproductions, the accompanying monograph gathers prominent scholars Ned Blackhawk, Brenda J. Child, Léuli Eshrāghi, Adrienne Huard, Bryan C. Keene, John P. Lukavic and Patricia Norby, addressing themes such as Queer theory, historical and contemporary contexts, visual analysis and lived experience. Léuli Eshrāghi and Lukavic cite an interview in Toronto Life where Monkman states, “I started looking at landscape painting and North American art history as it was painted by Europeans and how they saw Indigenous people… that narrative needed to be challenged.”