NEW YORK, NY.- Beginning this fall, The Frick Collection will present an installation in its intimate Cabinet Gallery showcasing a series of new paintings by the Cree artist Kent Monkman (b. 1965), whose practice explores historic European art and narratives from an Indigenous perspective. Monkman takes inspiration from Officer and Laughing Girl (ca. 1657), one of the Frick's three paintings by Johannes Vermeer. Through this series, Monkman expands the histories traditionally associated with such Dutch paintings, highlighting ways in which Vermeer and his contemporaries lived and worked in a context of avid global trade and colonization.
With his characteristic humor, style, and deeply researched iconography, Monkman deploys his alter ego—the time-traveling, shapeshifting, gender-fluid Miss Chief Eagle Testickle (a play on the words mischief and egotistical)—to imagine an evolution of Indigenous and European encounters over the last five centuries, with their attendant cultural, technological, and environmental changes. Throughout the run of the show, visitors will be able to view Vermeer's Officer and Laughing Girl nearby, in the permanent collection galleries.
In spring 2027, following the Frick installation, Monkman's series will travel to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.
Kent Monkman: Officer and Laughing Girl is the latest installment in the Frick's longstanding tradition of inviting contemporary artists and cultural figures to engage with its holdings through exhibitions, lectures, and publications. These initiatives continually offer fresh perspectives on the Frick's centuries-old masterpieces, which have inspired living artists in New York since the museum opened in 1935. Along with a richly illustrated catalogue, the show will be accompanied by an array of public programs, including a lecture by Monkman, a library workshop, and close-looking conversations and studio sessions led by Frick educators.
Commented Aimee Ng, the Frick's Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, "I have long admired how Kent brings lesser-known histories to light in his art, which grapples with complex topics while celebrating beauty, irreverence, and humanity's critical connections with each other and with the earth. Sustained by a deep study of European history and art, his paintings create new and enlightening ways of seeing the past and present, enriched by Indigenous history and culture. We hope visitors will enjoy reconsidering the conversation at the heart of Vermeer's iconic Officer and Laughing Girl through the imagined encounters in Kent's paintings."
Added Kent Monkman, "I am grateful to the Frick for inviting me to explore shifts of perspective in history and to speculate on the various exchanges happening in Vermeer's Officer and Laughing Girl. Some of these exchanges are cultural, some reference the commodification of New World resources, and some are more ambiguous. I hope these paintings inspire curiosity and fill in some of the missing narratives in our shared histories."
KENT MONKMAN'S SERIES
The five paintings in the exhibition each focus on a distinct century, from the 1600s to the present. In every work, Miss Chief is depicted sitting in a room similar to the one in Vermeer's painting, presenting a carved pipe to a male sitter across the table. Symbols of exchange threaded throughout the series evoke the evolution of interactions—often transactional—between Indigenous and settler-colonial powers. As the centuries progress, the paintings shift from cool to warm tones, reflecting the rise of global temperatures.
Monkman's series recontextualizes the relationships at play in Vermeer's composition by inverting the figures and placing an Indigenous perspective at the center of the dialogue. In this way, the artist provides windows into important chapters of Indigenous experiences in North America, reminiscent of Vermeer's celebrated windows into seventeenth-century Dutch life. Much as Vermeer included beaver-felt hats, pearls, Indian veneered boxes, and Chinese porcelain in his paintings—products of the prolific trade networks of the Dutch East and West India Companies—Monkman deploys a variety of objects with poignant material histories: animal skins, beads, feathers, coins, guns, gold, trade silver, a red point blanket, a crucifix, and a handheld glass silhouette reminiscent of an iPhone.
The series begins in the seventeenth century with New Amsterdam, which most closely follows Vermeer's original work. Miss Chief and a Dutch officer sit across from each other in the titular capital of the Dutch settlement of New Netherland, on the southern tip of Manhattan Island. Miss Chief is adorned with furs and pearls, while the officer wears a beaver-felt hat and offers gold coins, representing trade between Dutch settlers and Indigenous nations. In place of the map in Officer and Laughing Girl (which Vermeer copied after a 1621 map of Holland and West Friesland), New Amsterdam presents a Winter Count, a means of recording history, typically on buffalo hide, among the Lakota and other Plains Indigenous nations: Each winter, community elders determine the most significant event to represent the year as a pictographic image. Miss Chief's Winter Count represents events covering millions of years, as narrated in her memoirs, excerpts of which are included in the exhibition's catalogue.
The next work in the series, New France, features a male counterpart resembling Samuel de Champlain, who established New France as a French colony and fostered relationships and trade networks with Algonquian-speaking nations along the St. Lawrence River. He bears a musket and gunpowder, alluding to the introduction to Indigenous communities of European firearms and ammunition, which encouraged large-scale commercial hunting and transformed skills and strategies for combat. The map in New France is a modified version of a 1722 French chart of Hudson Bay, whose outline Monkman humorously exaggerates to resemble the shape of male genitalia. Miss Chief's jewelry here includes seven trade-silver beaver pendants. Her shoulder is draped in a red point blanket, a common trade item from the Hudson's Bay Company, the longest-running corporation in North American history (founded in 1670, liquidated in 2025).
Black Hills also shows Miss Chief in red, this time in the dress of a nineteenth-century saloon girl. She is seated across from a man who resembles General George Armstrong Custer, who led an attack against Lakota and Northern Cheyenne warriors in 1876, commonly called the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Custer's Last Stand, or the Battle of the Greasy Grass. Custer faces both Miss Chief and a small gold-framed portrait depicting Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota leader who resisted the general's attack alongside Chief Gall and Crazy Horse. The gold nuggets on the table represent the crux of the conflict: After an 1874 expedition led by Custer uncovered gold in the Black Hills—Pahá Sápa, a sacred Lakota site—the government rescinded Lakota sovereignty over the land, and President Ulysses S. Grant issued an ultimatum requiring the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho to relocate to reservations. Together with more than two thousand warriors, Sitting Bull, Chief Gall, and Crazy Horse refused the order and defeated Custer's troops in June 1876.
The twentieth century is represented in Reservation, where gold features again, here in the form of a crucifix held by a Catholic priest. The scene evokes the brutal history of Christian residential schools, which removed Indigenous children from their communities, forbidding them to speak their languages and practice their customs. Miss Chief sheds clothing in this warmer scene, wearing only red thigh-high boots and a red wrap. The map behind her represents a picture of the nation's land that remained allotted to Indigenous reservations around 1900. This followed the General Allotment Act (1887), a federal law that divided unceded tribal territories via a government-imposed system of private ownership.
The series concludes with Manhattan, set in the twenty-first century. Pictured in a sweltering Manhattan interior, Miss Chief sits almost entirely unclothed across from a bald man, identified by Monkman as a nameless tech executive, who is drenched in sweat, having removed his button-down shirt to reveal a damp tank top. He holds a glass-like rectangle resembling a modern cellphone. The painting on the wall is an inverted version of a work by Monkman in his series Beauty and the Beasts, exploring kinship between humans and nature, alluding to Indigenous perspectives on caretaking of the natural world.
In the Frick's Cabinet Gallery, the five paintings will hang against a wallpaper with a "Beaver Baroque" pattern—designed by Monkman and hand-printed in Brooklyn—featuring a whimsical array of beavers engaging in human activities, from enjoying a glass of wine to figure painting, dancing, and more. The beaver is a critical point of connection between Vermeer's painting and Monkman's series, as well as a recurring figure in Monkman's work, evoking the Dutch trade and transport of the American species to Europe, where it had been hunted to near extinction. For the Dutch, the beaver became the most significant resource extracted from New Netherland, reaching a peak haul in 1657, around the same time Vermeer painted Officer and Laughing Girl.
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
The exhibition will be accompanied by a bilingual English–Canadian French catalogue featuring contributions by Monkman, Ng, and Emma Hassencahl-Perley, Curator of Indigenous Art at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. The texts include a historical essay on Vermeer by Ng, an examination of the exhibition and each work in the series by Hassencahl-Perley, and extracts from The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle by Monkman and Gisèle Gordon.
