Kent Monkman & Her Red Bottoms
Art can be political and fire at the same time
A few weeks ago, I went to Montreal with some buddies. The trip amounted to an eating tour with breaks to do tourist things, and it was a valuable reminder of the joy in saying the most shit in the company of other men. We went to Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts at my behest, but it turned out to be a highlight for the whole group, courtesy the current headliner exhibition by Kent Monkman.
Miss Chief Eagle Testickle in the House
The most recurring motif in Monkman’s exhibition, is 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 perceived notions of history and Indigenous peoples.
I got a chuckle at a Boomer tour guide struggling to explain this to similar-aged attendees, but I hope you can recognize a drag persona when you see one.
Miss Chief finds a place in many of Monkman’s pieces, sometimes as a primary subject, sometimes as a face in the crowd, sometimes as a distant observer, and in the case of the flagship piece, History is Painted by the Victors, a voyeur. In this piece, which grants its name to the exhibition at large, Monkman replicates Albert Bierstadt’s painting of Mount Corcoran but includes a mockingly idyllic scene of General Custer’s men bathing, as if these soldiers were nubile savages in their own right. And on the shore, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle stands before an easel, wearing nothing but knee-high red stiletto boots, evidently invisible to lithe pale figures around her.
Miss Chief is depicted in luxuriant detail, perpetually in artful undress, often cradled in flowing red fabric, almost always in Christian Loubotin heels: the expensive, the red bottoms, the bloody shoes. She’s hot, both in the man way and in the woman way.1
In 2025, queer androgyny often looks like an abdication of embodied gender, of rejecting masculinity and femininity in favor of a becoming a mushroom or cute bug. It’s a spiritual dodge away from the tricky questions of sex and desire—not only does evasive androgyny minimize one’s attack surface against misogyny and resentment of men; but it also removes oneself from the accusation of sexual threat. Remember, it is still acceptable to be beautiful in the 2020s, but it is not acceptable to be horny. By abandoning a willful identification to any human gender, the uwu-enby can exempt themselves from the clingy desperation of feminine attachment and the predatory hunger of masculine want, in favor of platonic cuddling and the occasional smooch.2
This works great for a lot of people. But as a gay Cree man, Monkman does not have this option. Instead, he embraces a maximalist androgyny, posing a sculpted masculine physique like a pinup girl, and depicting the figure in thousand-dollar heels that are not sold in that size.3
In text, such a concept calls to mind the twee, underwhelming “queer art” I put up with as a leftist college student, art that was only noteworthy in that it was gay, as described by an exegesis on the adjacent placard in fourteen-point serif. But in practice, it works, because Monkman is—for all his sincere focus about Indigenous self-authorship—a fan and student of French Romantic art. His approach to color, silhouette, and composition reflect that lineage: big skies, dramatic facial expressions, beautiful bodies. The subject matter has a political agenda, but the politics never impede the eroticism.
Influences on One’s Sleeve
Kent Monkman names as an influence Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), who in turn took influence from Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), who in turn never painted the same after witnessing the works of the Venetian Renaissance. Venice didn’t have the greats you remember: da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Botticelli were all Florentine. Those artists do live up to the hype (I must return to Florence), but they focused on technical perfection: clean lines, precise imagery, deep lore on all those dudes around baby Jesus. The Venetians didn’t care about lines—soft shapes and wonky figures were forgivable as long as that ultramarine blue went hard.
Rubens was, on a technical level, a more advanced painter than his Venetian forebears. But his post-1600s works don’t seek perfect legibility. There’s a lot going on in paintings like Perseus Liberating Andromeda (1639-40) and The Feast of Venus (1635-1636), and Rubens lets subject and background blend into each other. But the vibes still hit, in part because because Rubens is good at painting hot people, in part because his red fabrics consistently pop.
Delacroix took this ethos into the industrial age, re-emphasizing color and movement over form, in contravension of both Neoclassical painting and the then-rising technology of photography. Instead of perfection, Delacroix sought the sublime in his artwork, in the hopes that if you painted a hot enough woman, the resulting artwork really might become a portal to God. Don’t laugh too hard—the moral of Pygmalion’s Statue is that sufficiently beautiful art does court the attention of the Divine. To that end, Delacroix painted not only hot women but also chaotic scenes of battle and shipwreck that—like Rubens’s old works—don’t seek perfect legibility but instead luxuriate in spectacle and color.
Monkman can pull this ethos even further. With the aid of high-resolution photography, he can stage a painting with real-life models, even letting those models improvise a bit during the shoot. This enables paintings as lifelike as he chooses without trading off visual spectacle. However, the intervening two centuries since French Romanticism have brought new advancements in artistic abstraction. Now, painters can access a language of abstraction in which wonky figures and muddled lines are not mere technical failures but instead careful references to prior artistic movements. Remember: Kent Monkman can paint a painting that looks like a photograph, so every deviation from that style is on purpose. As an example, consider—in my opinion—the coolest painting in the exhibition:
Like Rubens’s and Delacroix’s paintings, Seeing Red does not seek total legibility. But instead of only prioritizing loud colors,4 Monkman throws bizarre imagery at the viewer, in a manner you have also seen in Childish Gambino’s music video for “This is America”. Why is there a Spanish bullfight in the suburbs of Winnipeg? Why is the bull painted in a Cubist manner? Is that a war dance in the background? Is that why the police helicopter is here? But why is Hermes chilling in the painting, with his divine winged Adidas dangling from the power lines? The density and discontinuity of symbolism in the piece calls to mind a riot. And the invocation of a riot motivates the viewer to ask why Kent Monkman, a Cree Indian who thinks a great deal about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s role in the genocide of his people, wants a viewer to think about rioting.
Political Art Doesn’t Have to Suck
The line between political art and propaganda is thin and fundamentally impossible to articulate outside the Potter Stewart test of knowing it when one sees it. Monkman’s work straddles that dividing line, particularly in his paintings of the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
I’ve developed a reflexive distaste for leftist propaganda, largely because most of it fails as art. The symbols are blunted out of fear of misuse, the eroticism is bowdlerized into affirmation, and the memes buckle under the weight of their own asterisks. Contemporary leftist art frequently doesn’t have The Sauce, in part because there is no greater danger to a leftist artist than another leftist artist.
Monkman’s paintings are nearly as blunt—these paintings hit the viewer over the head with “I’m GAY, I’m CREE, and I’m MAD,” and even Miss Chief Eagle Testickle treads into twee platitudes about caring for each other in the apocalypse, or whatever. But Monkman’s Romanticism redeems the art. The queer, Indigenous, and anticolonial subject matter do not interfere with the color and composition that puts Monkman in dialogue with the Old Masters that are just as much his ancestors as his Cree forbears. The symbolism is given room to speak, the jokes are allowed to land, Miss Chief is allowed to be horny for a Mountie, and Monkman refused to apologize for his drag persona’s $1,000 heels. Art can advance political goals without sacrificing underlying quality.
It just has to be good art.
This writing reflects my views alone, and does not reflect the views of SemiAnalysis. This is not investment advice. For analysis on semiconductors, AI, energy systems, industrial inputs, or utilities, visit https://semianalysis.com
Incidentally, Monkman, as a pleasant-on-the-eyes artist with a sense of humor, probably has a kickass drag show in his back pocket. I want to know his top three karaoke tracks.
To the extent it is possible to embrace eroticism without gender, the artistic projects are still nascent.
Miss Chief should buy Fluevog instead.
…although goddamn the orange on that car fire pops