b. Ontario, Canada, 1965
Honour Dance
2020
Acrylic on canvas
60 × 94 1/4 in. (152.4 × 239.4 cm)
Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2020 (2020.030)
Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Tex Andrews
Kent Monkman’s trademark style is an astute reclamation of traditional painting, appropriating compositions from western art history to create contemporary adaptations that question colonialist depictions of Indigenous people. Monkman humorously complicates dominant notions of history, centering themes of loss, hope, and resilience for Indigenous communities. Honour Dance references nineteenth-century lawyer and painter George Catlin’s Dance to the Berdash (see below), which portrays the ceremony honoring a person of a third or multiple gender, who were often viewed with reverence and are now referred to by the contemporary term Two-Spirit. Catlin, traveling the American West, observed with shock this specific ceremony among the Sac and Fox people on an 1835 visit to Rock Island on the Upper Mississippi. In his version, Monkman updates Catlin’s painting to reflect his own perspective as a member of the Cree Fisher River First Nation, with Miss Chief Eagle Testickle—Monkman’s gender-fluid, time-traveling alter ego—as the central figure. Her powerful presence anchors an alternative take on such ceremonies, restoring the scene to one of celebration.
George Catlin
b. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, 1796–1872
Dance to the Berdash
1835–1837
Oil on canvas
19 1⁄2 × 27 1⁄2 in. (49.6 × 70 cm)
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr. (1985.66.442)
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