By Matthew Wexler
Kent Monkman is haunting me. As is his alter ego, Chief Eagle Testickle. I first encountered Monkman’s large-scale murals, “Welcoming the Newcomers” and “Resurgence of the People,” when they appeared in the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Each spanning 22 feet wide by 11 feet high, the works hovered for 16 months, challenging visitors to rethink their perceptions of colonialism, gender, and American history. Perhaps Chief Eagle Testickle, described by the Met as “a time-traveling, shape-shifting, supernatural being who reverses the colonial gaze to challenge received notions of history and Indigenous peoples,” is a distant relative.
She’s now set up residence at the Denver Art Museum, where the artist and author is receiving his first major show in the U.S., Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors (through August 17, 2025).
The exhibit includes 41 works, including explorations of climate change, Two-Spirit and other queer communities, and a dismantling of colonial narratives. His companion series, The Rendevous, focuses on the “‘golden age’ of settler-Indigenous relations.”
I’ve been increasingly frustrated by the current administration’s sentiment about who belongs here. Monkman’s work offers a historic perspective through a lens often shadowed by an entitled, Eurocentric gaze. “I’ve always been drawn toward history paintings,” Monkman told The Met, “because so many indigenous experiences were never portrayed.”
“Welcoming the Newcomers” presents an entry point to Monkman’s work in which viewers can unpack a multitude of references to Euro-American artists, including Peter Paul Rubens, Thomas Crawford, and Gustave Courbet.
You might be thinking, I don’t know who those artists are either. This is too deep, my head hurts!
Then sit with it. Discover a shackled enslaved person reaching from the tumultuous sea despite a future stripped of freedom, or a tear trailing down the cheek of an Indigenous woman as she supports a colonizer washed ashore. And rats. Lots of rats (look closely), who hitched a ride with early European explorer vessels.
Monkman’s works challenge the cultural narratives we assume to be true because dominant groups have amplified them. But the truth is relative. History is Painted by the Victors invites us to question the artist’s gaze, and that of the artists who came before him.
Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors is on exhibit at the Denver Art Museum through August 17, 2025.
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