Kent Monkman: Officer and Laughing Girl

This fall, in its intimate Cabinet Gallery, The Frick Collection will present an installation of new paintings by the contemporary artist Kent Monkman (b. Canada, 1965), whose practice explores historic European art and narratives from an Indigenous perspective. For this project, Monkman takes inspiration from Officer and Laughing Girl (ca. 1657), one of the Frick’s three paintings by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, to probe the ways in which it and other artworks of its time represented the effects of global trade and colonization.

With his characteristic humor, style, and deeply researched iconography, Monkman deploys his alter ego—the time-traveling, shapeshifting, gender-fluid Miss Chief—to imagine an evolution of Indigenous and European encounters over the last five centuries, with their attendant cultural, technological, and environmental changes. After experiencing the installation, visitors will be able to proceed to the nearby South Hall, in the permanent collection galleries, to view the beloved work by Vermeer that prompted the series. The exhibition, which will travel from the Frick to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, will be accompanied by a bilingual English–Canadian French catalogue featuring texts by Monkman, Aimee Ng, the Frick's Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, and Emma Hassencahl-Perley, Curator of Indigenous Art at the Beaverbrook.