Officer and Laughing Girl

In this lecture, the artist Kent Monkman will discuss the new paintings he created for the exhibition Kent Monkman: Officer and Laughing Girl: https://www.frick.org/exhibitions/monkman. He will present an overview of the project, with attention to the fur trade, climate change, Johannes Vermeer, historical events in Europe and North America over a five-century span, and the evolution of Indigenous-settler relations from New Amsterdam to modern-day Manhattan. He will also introduce his gender-fluid alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, who often appears in his work as a time-traveling, shape-shifting, supernatural being who reverses the colonial gaze to challenge received notions of history and Indigenous peoples.

Kent Monkman is an interdisciplinary Cree visual artist. A member of ocêkwi sîpiy (Fisher River Cree Nation), he lives and works between New York City and Toronto. His artworks are held in the permanent collections of public institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, the National Gallery of Canada, and macLYON. Private foundations that house his works include Art Bridges, the Gochman Family Collection, the Sobey Art Foundation, and the Walker Youngbird Foundation. His works have been exhibited at institutions such as the Louvre-Lens, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Palais de Tokyo, and the Royal Ontario Museum. In 2019, Monkman was the inaugural artist invited to participate in The Met’s Great Hall Commission project. In 2023, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada—Canada’s highest civilian honor—and in 2025, he received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

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Leadership support for this exhibition is provided by Rosamond Ivey and the Henry Luce Foundation. LUCE Henry Luce Foundation Sponsor logo Additional support is provided by Dr. Taiheng Cheng and by Sandra Wijnberg and Hugh Freund.