Exhibition Review: Being Legendary
Criticism Writing: Short-form Exhibition Review for Being Legendary by Kent Monkman
Exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), October 2022
By Erika Yuen
October 20th, 2022
Being Legendary
Kent Monkman, 2022
Shotgun Review by Erika Yuen
This bejeweled midnight gallery welcomes you to a provocative gender-fluid indigenous male in Louboutin heels. A child reads the description for the Constellation of Knowledge, 2022, “laughter is our medicine”, while a man chuckles at a high-heel fossil. One quick turn exposes a vaulted catholic chapel before a white gallery for the Compositional Study for The Going Away Song, 2022. It screams colonial horror, framed by 8 ghostly pairs of moccasins in a mirrored case demanding reflection. This is Miss Chief Eagle Testickle’s universe, a rainbow-tinted story with simplified art language and reclaimed colonial narratives translated in Cree, English, and French.
Green, purple, and gradient-coloured rooms hold man-made and recovered institutional artifacts paralleled with illustrative paintings to rewrite the Indigenous narrative misrepresented by Western institutions. Kent Monkman’s Being Legendary at the ROM creates space for green, non-academic, bodies like myself to begin to understand complex Indigenous histories. While Monkman’s 2007 ROM performance, Séance, passively responded to the exclusion of his art from the First People’s Gallery, Miss Chief actively returns with an intentional institutional showdown built across the museum’s European Gallery.
Prior to Being Legendary, I always questioned what our allowance as foreign audiences were to engage with Indigenous discourse. Who is welcome? Am I allowed? Yet Monkman comforts these concerns with de-formalized artist statements, anti-white gallery walls and post-colonial queer theory interventions that challenge the academic and historical institutions that gatekeep Indigenous art. Miss Chief’s alter ego enables broad audience accessibility and suggests that the topics of Indigenous art can, too, expand beyond colonial critique; it can speak to curious audiences like us in non-indigenous communities.
Works Cited
Art Canada Institute - Institut de l’art canadien. (n.d.). Kent Monkman: Style and technique. Art Canada Institute - Institut de l'art canadien. Retrieved October 20, 2022, from https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/kent-monkman/style-and-technique/
Monkman, K. (n.d.). Kent Monkman. Retrieved October 20, 2022, from https://www.kentmonkman.com/
ROM. (n.d.). Kent Monkman: Being legendary. Royal Ontario Museum. Retrieved October 20, 2022, from https://www.rom.on.ca/en/exhibitions-galleries/exhibitions/kent-monkman- being-legendary
Sykes, K. (n.d.). Shapeshifters, Time Travellers and storytellers. Royal Ontario Museum. Retrieved October 20, 2022, from https://www.rom.on.ca/en/exhibitions- galleries/exhibitions/shapeshifters-time-travellers-and- storytellers#:~:text=Shapeshifters%2C%20Time%20Travellers%20and%20Storytellers%2 0%7C%20Royal%20Ontario%20Museum