Kindred Spirits (After Durand) 2017

Kent Monkman, born in 1965, paints landscapes in the style of the Hudson River School but with a twist. Here, in Kindred Spirits (After Durand), he’s working in a classical mode, a detailed picturesque style, but it's like he wants to mess with it and queer it at the same time. What’s so striking is how he takes this history painting and then mischievously inserts his own gender-fluid persona, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, right there on the ledge, as though in conversation, or maybe in a clinch, with another figure. I’m imagining him making this. It's almost like he's saying: ‘Well, that's a pretty view, but I'm going to put a little smudge of paint that's a body, and then you're really going to see something!’ Painters have always borrowed from each other, reworked the past, and messed around with the conventions that came before them, and Monkman is no exception. He's in good company.