Kent Monkman: Breaking Waves
A towering wave surges across a vast canvas. Figures drift and collide, while at the centre of the composition, a single figure dreams.
Kent Monkman: Breaking Waves at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia brings together works that examine the visual narratives shaping Canadian history and identity, with particular attention to Indigenous and settler relationships in North America. The exhibition has been on view since May 16, 2026.
At the heart of the show is Miss Chief’s Wet Dream (2018), the largest painting produced by Monkman’s studio to date and his first major painting set on the ocean. The painting depicts a dynamic seascape on which two vessels and their passengers move through turbulent waters, while Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, Monkman’s time-travelling and gender-fluid alter ego, appears asleep amid the surrounding activity. The scene interweaves themes of dreaming, collision, turbulence, and treaties, drawing on Monkman’s engagement with European and Indigenous artistic traditions and placing the work within a broader history of representation.
Monkman, an artist of Swampy Cree and English/Irish descent from Fisher River Cree Nation, is known for his monumental paintings, which draw on and reconsider the traditions of European academic art. His canvases combine European art-historical imagery with Indigenous perspectives to examine how stories of the past are represented and understood.
The process behind each painting is meticulous and research driven. Monkman and his studio spend months consulting archives, museum collections, and oral histories. References to French Romantic painting and European art traditions appear alongside elements drawn from Indigenous art and storytelling, bringing these influences and contemporary perspectives together to construct complex narratives that connect past and present.
Monkman’s conceptual development process unfolds through a series of studies, beginning with gestural sketches before progressing to small acrylic paintings and broader compositional drafts. Refined over a period of months, these preliminary steps allow him to arrange figures, motifs, and details prior to execution. Beyond technique, his practice directly confronts conventional historical accounts by bringing Indigenous lived experiences into dialogue with the Western canon. “What I’ve been doing with my own paintings is authorizing Indigenous experience into art history,” says Kent Monkman. His work draws on diverse periods and traditions to reconsider how visual culture is constructed and whose voices are preserved.
Kent Monkman: Breaking Waves provides visitors with an opportunity to explore these ideas through the works in the exhibition. Miss Chief’s Wet Dream (2018) stands as a gateway to the deeper themes and hidden narratives throughout: the meaning of treaties, or agreements that establish responsibilities between nations, the visual language of vessels, and the layered presence of lore, history, and imagination that shapes Monkman’s ambitious vision.
About the Artist
Kent Monkman (b. 1965) is an interdisciplinary Cree visual artist. A member of Fisher River Cree Nation in Treaty 5 Territory (Manitoba, Canada), he lives and works between New York City and Toronto.
Known for his thought-provoking interventions into Western European and American art history, Monkman explores themes of colonization, sexuality, loss, and resilience—the complexities of historic and contemporary Indigenous experiences—across painting, film/video, performance, and installation. Monkman’s gender-fluid alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle often appears in his work as a time-traveling, shape-shifting, supernatural being who reverses the colonial gaze to challenge received notions of history and Indigenous peoples.
Monkman’s artworks are held in the permanent collections of numerous institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Denver Art Museum; the Hirshhorn Museum; the Hood Museum of Art; the Heard Museum; Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; the Glenbow Museum; the Art Gallery of Ontario; and macLYON. Private collections that house his works include Art Bridges; the Horseman Foundation; the Tia Collection, the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation; Forge Project; the Gochman Family Collection; the Sobey Art Foundation; and the Rob & Monique Sobey Foundation. His works have been exhibited at institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; the National Gallery of Canada; Royal Ontario Museum; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Hayward Gallery; Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art; Musée d’art Contemporain de Rochechouart; the Philbrook Museum of Art; Palais de Tokyo; and the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College. Monkman has had two nationally touring solo exhibitions, Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience (2017-2020), and The Triumph of Mischief (2007-2010). In 2019, Monkman was commissioned as the inaugural artist to make two monumental paintings for The Met’s Great Hall Commission project. He has created other site-specific performances at the Royal Ontario Museum; Compton Verney, Warwickshire; and the Denver Art Museum.
Monkman’s short film and video works, collaboratively made with Gisèle Gordon, have screened at festivals such as the Berlinale (2007, 2008) and the Toronto International Film Festival (2007, 2015). Monkman and Gordon’s literary collaboration, The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island was published in 2023. Monkman is the recipient of the Ontario Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts (2017), an honorary doctorate degree from OCAD University (2017), the Indspire Award (2014), and the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award (2014). In 2023, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada—Canada’s highest civilian honour—and in 2025, he received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.