Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience takes you on a journey through the past 150 years of Canada. It is a journey that reclaims and reinserts Indigenous voices into the collective memory of our country, challenging and shattering colonial ideas of our history.
The artist’s gender fluid, time-travelling alter-ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, is the narrator of this story, told through the lens of Indigenous resilience. Miss Chief leads us from New France and Confederation to the urban environment of Winnipeg’s North End and contemporary life on the reserve.
Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience provides a searing critique of Canada’s colonial policies, past and present, on the occasion of the recent sesquicentennial. As Monkman explains, “The last 150 years—the period of Modernity—represents the most devastating period for First Peoples, including the signing of the numbered treaties, the reserve system, genocidal policies of the residential schools, mass incarceration and urban squalor.”
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Kent Monkman is a Canadian artist of Cree ancestry who works with a variety of media, including painting, film/video, performance, and installation. His work is known for its provocative reinterpretations of Romantic North American landscapes, and it explores themes of colonization, sexuality, loss and resilience—the complexities of historic and contemporary Indigenous experience.
Featured here are three of Kent Monkmans most iconic works from Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience; The Daddies, Iron Horse, and The Subjugation of Truth.
- 24" x 18"
- Printed in Vancouver, Canada