Study for Icon for a New Empire. Graphite on acid free paper. 317x217 mm; 12½x8½ inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right recto. 2002. A preparatory drawing for the artist's large, narrative painting Icon for a New Empire.
Provenance: private collection.
Kent Monkman is an interdisciplinary Cree visual artist. A member of Fisher River Cree Nation in Treaty 5 Territory (Manitoba.)
Among many aspects of his allegorical work is a modern, indigenous, queer, reflection on classical works of art. In doing so he flips the historical narrative and creates a magical, at times ribald, present rife with insinuation and allegations of centuries of mistreatment of the First Nations people. Here, with acknowledgement to James Earle Fraser's sculpture End of the Trail (a small copy of which can be seen in the background) he depicts an artist breathing life into this very statue through a kiss. It is a gesture reminiscent of the artist in Jean-Léon Gérôme's painting, Pygmalion and Galatea. By doing so Monkman repositions an icon of the American West as an object of sexual desire above and beyond its artistic merits. The irony of this sexual attraction can be found in the statue's original meaning, reflecting the suffering and cultural destruction visited on Native Americans by the colonizers of North America; with the main figure (modeled by Fraser after Seneca Chief John Big Tree) embodying the tribulations and exhaustion of a people driven from their native lands.
Monkman's paintings can be found in private collections and institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Denver Art Museum; National Gallery of Canada; the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
