The fourth world kent monkman
Significance & Critical Issues
By exposing the complexities of historic and contemporary Indigenous experiences, Kent Monkman has raised awareness of critical challenges facing communities today. He has brought together explorations of Two Spirit identity and sexuality with a commitment to investigating treaties and recognizing lived realities for Indigenous peoples in cities and on reserves, and he has developed groundbreaking projects to decolonize museums across Turtle Island. Through deeply personal and compelling work, he has provoked transformative conversations about identity and history in Canada.
Reclaiming Two Spirit Identity
When he created his alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, Monkman set out to challenge dominant Western discourses of sexuality, power, knowledge, and gender, and the persisting misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples by Europeans. Prior to colonization, many First Nations honoured those who were Two Spirit or had other non-binary genders and sexualities as sacred members of society. The term “Two Spirit” is derived from niizh manidoowag, an Anishinaabemowin term. It is used to express the existence of “a third gender” tha
In the Curator’s Words is an occasional series that takes a critical look at current exhibitions through the eyes of curators.
Derrick R. Cartwright, director of curatorial affairs for the Timken Museum of Art, talks about the museum’s newest exhibition, “Reconsidering Bierstadt: Kent Monkman,” on display through June 8. It revisits Albert Bierstadt’s 1864 oil-on-canvas painting “Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall” and looks at First Nation Canadian artist Kent Monkman’s 2012 work “The Fourth World.” Monkman’s acrylic-on-canvas painting is on loan from the Denver Art Museum, which next month will present the mid-career retrospective “Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors.”
Q: Talk about why it’s important for us to revisit classic pieces of art, like Bierstadt’s work, and look at it through the lens of modern art and artists.
A: The Timken has an extraordinary collection. Our museum’s paintings are admired by scholars throughout the world, and we often lend these objects to important exhibitions that put them into meaningful contexts elsewhere. For audiences in San Diego who know these works well, however, we are always searching for new ways to demonstrate these
Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment
Reviews
An exhibition looks at historical conceptions of nature in the United States.
by Louis Bury
January 3, 2019
John Gast, American Progress, 1872. Oil on canvas. Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles.
Co-curated by Karl Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock, Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment at the Princeton University Art Museum surveys over three hundred years of American art from an environmental standpoint. The ambitious and important undertaking encompasses over 120 artworks, organized into three periods spanning the colonial era to the present: “Colonization and Empire,” “Industrialization and Conservation,” and “Ecology and Environmentalism.” The show’s massive scope affords a unique opportunity to view shifting historical conceptions of nature as manifested in American visual art, suggesting not only more robust genealogies of environmental art but also a sharper sense of art history’s own institutional ecologies, of how and why artworks become incorporated into museums, curricula, and public consciousness.
The first work to greet viewers in the exhibition’s “Colonization and Empi
| Kent Monkman, The Fourth World, 2012. Denver Art Museum, gift of Kent and Vicki Logan |
San Diego's Timken Museum of Art is representing a Kent Monkman painting alongside the Albert Bierstadt landscape that inspired it. The Bierstadt, Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall, has been in the Timken collection since 1966. Monkman's The Fourth World is on loan from the Denver Art Museum. Larger than its model, it replaces Bierstadt's settler colonialists with blond horsemen pursuing buffalo through a Richard Serra sculpture.
The depicted Serra is Clara-Clara, a 1983 Corten sculpture commissioned for Paris that sparked a populist outcry much like that of Tilted Arc in Manhattan. In both cases citizens complained that the sculpture "herded" pedestrians and interrupted a general commons. Monkman's picture, then, satirizes a certain strain of (White) American art appropriating the monumentality of landscape.
The Timken installation will be on view through June 8, 2025. Meanwhile the Cree Nation artist's first major retrospective, "Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors," runs at the Denver Art Museum Apr. 20 to Aug. 17, 2025.
ANewsSan Diego’s Timken Museum of Art Celebrates Contemporary, First Nation Artist, Kent Monkman, and His Painting The Fourth World (2012), which Reimagines a Timken Favorite, Albert Bierstadt’s Cho-looke, The Yosemite Fall (1864)On View: March 26 - June 8, 2025Reconsidering Bierstadt: Kent Monkman is the latest in an ongoing series of curatorial projects which highlight the relationships between cutting-edge contemporary art and the outstanding permanent collection of the Timken Museum of Art. Previous projects have looked at Rembrandt through the eyes of Dutch photographer/videographer, Rineke Dijsktra, and at the portrait practice of Anthony van Dyck through the vibrant work of Kehinde Wiley. Beginning March 26 and running through June 8, 2025, the Timken’s American Gallery will be transformed by a staged encounter between the 19th-century American painter Albert Bierstadt and the First Nation (Cree) Canadian artist, Kent Monkman. In this season of renewal and rebirth, Reconsidering Bierstadt. . . offers visitors the opportunity to freshly compare one of the Timken’s most beloved works, Cho-looke, The Yosemite Fall (1864) with The Fourth Wo |