Inspired by the recent Hudson River-posting by @Tervell, just wanted to put Monkman on Hexbear's radar. He's a Cree artist whose work can be broadly described as colonial queering: reading through, critiquing, and reclaiming ongoing colonial injustices, Indigenous identities, Canadian founding mythologies, and the art historical canon with large-scale acrylic history painting and performance -- frequently starring his gender-fluid lter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. And it's tight as hell. Genuinely believe he's the best artist working in Canada right now, possibly ever.

For Kent Monkman, an interdisciplinary visual artist of Cree descent, using beautiful landscapes as a backdrop for his paintings is a form of seduction to attract viewers. People assume that they are looking at a nineteenth-century painting from the Hudson River School (the American art movement, celebrated for its depictions of sublime North American nature, that is a source for Monkman’s settings), but once drawn in, a new narrative becomes apparent: “In stealing these landscapes back, there is a metaphorical way of reclaiming land or reclaiming the landscape.” Monkman rewrites the history of the colonization of Indigenous lands while overturning the stereotypes surrounding Indigenous people.