"Kent Monkman: Life & Work" is the first comprehensive book on one of the most important and internationally celebrated contemporary artists in Canada. Subversive, bold, unapologetic, and unforgiving, the work of Kent Monkman (b.1965) has left an unmistakable mark on contemporary Canadian art. Since the early 2000s, Monkman, accompanied by his time-travelling, shape-shifting, gender-fluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, has redefined the Canadian cultural landscape. Riffing on techniques of the Old Masters, Monkman first found fame by recreating notable landscape paintings and populating them with Indigenous visions of resistance.
Kent Monkman's new, large-scale project takes the viewer on a journey through Canada's history that starts in the present and takes us back to 150 years before Confederation. With its entry points in the harsh urban environment of Winnipeg's north end, and contemporary life on the reserve, Kent Monkman: Shame and Prejudice, A Story of Resilience takes us all the way back to the period of New France and the fur trade. The Rococo masterpiece The Swing by Jean-Honore ́ Fragonard has been reinterpreted as an installation with Monkman's alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, in a beaver trimmed baroque dress, swinging back and forth between the Generals Wolfe and Montcalm. The book includes Monkman's own paintings, drawings and sculptural works, in dialogue with historical artefacts and art works borrowed from museum and private collections from across Canada.
Revision & Resistance reveals the story of Kent Monkman's monumental 2019 diptych commission mistik?siwak (Wooden Boat People) for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book celebrates Monkman's historic achievement with essays and contributions by today's most prominent voices on Indigenous art and Canadian painting.
From the Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of How to Be an Artist: a deliciously readable survey of the art world in turbulent times Jerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists, and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice: witty and provocative, he has attracted contemporary readers to fine art as few critics have. An early champion of forgotten and overlooked women artists, he has also celebrated the pioneering work of African American, LGBTQ+, and other long-marginalized creators. Sotheby's Institute of Art has called him, simply, “the art critic.” Now, in Art Is Life, Jerry Saltz draws on two decades of work to offer a real-time survey of contemporary art as a barometer of our times. Chronicling a period punctuated by dramatic turning points—from the cultural reset of 9/11 to the rolling social crises of today—Saltz traces how visionary artists have both documented and challenged the culture. Art Is Life offers Saltz’s eye-opening appraisals of trailblazers like Kara Walker, David Wojnarowicz, Hilma af Klint, and Jasper Johns; provocateurs like Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, and Marina Abramović; and visionaries like Jackson Pollock, Bill Traylor, and Willem de Kooning. Saltz celebrates landmarks like the Obama portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, writes searchingly about disturbing moments such as the Ankara gallery assassination, and offers surprising takes on figures from Thomas Kinkade to Kim Kardashian. And he shares stories of his own haunted childhood, his time as a “failed artist,” and his epiphanies upon beholding work by Botticelli, Delacroix, and the cave painters of Niaux. With his signature blend of candor and conviction, Jerry Saltz argues in Art Is Life for the importance of the fearless artist—reminding us that art is a kind of channeled voice of human experience, a necessary window onto our times. The result is an openhearted and irresistibly readable appraisal by one of our most important cultural observers.
In recent decades, educators have been seeking ways to improve outcomes for Indigenous students. Yet most Indigenous education still takes place within a theoretical framework based in Eurocentric thought. In Teaching Each Other, Linda Goulet and Keith Goulet provide an alternative framework for teachers working with Indigenous students – one that moves beyond acknowledging Indigenous culture to one that actually strengthens Indigenous identity. Drawing on Nehinuw (Cree) concepts such as kiskinaumatowin, or “teaching each other,” Goulet and Goulet provide a new approach to teaching Indigenous students. Kiskinaumatowin transforms the normally hierarchical teacher-student relationship by making students and teachers equitable partners in education. Enriched with the success stories of educators who are applying Nehinuw concepts in Saskatchewan, Canada, this book demonstrates how this framework works in practice. The result is an alternative teaching model that can be used by teachers anywhere who want to engage with students whose culture may be different from the mainstream. This enhanced edition also includes audio pronunciations of each Cree word, as well as a glossary of Cree words and their meanings.
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Economist and Kirkus Reviews This “splendid biography” (Wall Street Journal) of Goethe presents his life and work as an essential touchstone for the modern age. A masterful intellectual portrait, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is celebrated as the seminal twenty-first-century biography of the writer considered to be the Shakespeare of German literature. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), a remarkably prolific poet, playwright, novelist, and—as Rüdiger Safranksi emphasizes—a statesman and naturalist, first awakened not only a burgeoning German nation but the European continent with his electrifying novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Safranski has scoured Goethe’s entire oeuvre, relying exclusively on primary sources, including his correspondence with contemporaries, to produce a “fresh and authentic” (Economist) portrait of the avatar of the Romantic era. Skillfully blending “artistic analysis with swift, sharp renderings” of the great political and intellectual figures Goethe encountered, “[Safranski’s] portrait of the prolific genius leaves the reader with lasting awe, even envy” of a monumental legacy (The New Yorker). As Safranski ultimately shows, Goethe’s greatest creation, even in comparison to his masterpiece Faust, was his own life.
Saulteaux artist Robert Houle (b.1947) has claimed space and authority for Indigenous representation in contemporary art for more than fifty years. This new publication celebrates his generational influence and coincides with his exhibition Red Is Beautiful, organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and touring to the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution. A curator, writer, and educator as well as an artist, Houle has made a profound impact. Growing up on the Sandy Bay First Nation/Kaa-wii-kwe-tawang-kak in Manitoba, he was placed in residential school and denied access to his family and traditions. Always fiercely principled, he has dedicated his career to challenging colonialist perspectives. In 1980, he resigned from his position as the first curator of contemporary Indigenous art at the National Museum of Man (now the Canadian Museum of History) and set off on a path toward creating a remarkable body of work that spans painting, drawing, and large-scale installation. Robert Houle: Life & Work reveals how Houle's artistic output has opened critical discussion on political and cultural issues surrounding First Nations peoples, including Indigenous identity, the impact of colonialism, and land claims and residential schools. Houle has played a pivotal role in bringing contemporary Indigenous artists into the Canadian art mainstream through his writing and curating of important exhibitions, such as Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada in 1992. This book also explores the artist's public art projects, critical elements of his legacy for art in Canada.
We Interrupt This Program tells the story of how Indigenous people are using media tactics in the realms of art, film, television, and journalism to rewrite Canada’s national narratives from Indigenous perspectives. Miranda Brady and John Kelly showcase the diversity of these interventions by offering personal accounts and reflections on key moments – witnessing survivor testimonies at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, attending the opening night of the ImagineNative Film + Media Festival, and discussing representations of Indigenous people with artists such as Kent Monkman and Dana Claxton and with CBC journalist Duncan McCue. These scene-setting moments bring to life their argument that media tactics, as articulations of Indigenous sovereignty, have the power not only to effect change from within Canadian institutions and through established mediums but also to spark new forms of political and cultural expression in Indigenous communities and among Indigenous youth. Theoretically sophisticated and eminently readable, We Interrupt This Program reveals how seemingly unrelated acts by Indigenous activists across Canada are decolonizing our cultural institutions from within, one intervention at a time.
This multidisciplinary book offers the first broad ecocritical review of American art and examines the environmental contexts of artistic practice from the colonial period to the present day. Tracing how visions of the environment have changed from the Native-European encounter to the emergence of modern ecological activism, more than a dozen scholars and practitioners discuss how artists have both responded to and actively instigated changes in ecological understanding.
