The Akron Art Museum is presenting “History is Painted by the Victors,” a retrospective of more than 30 large-scale paintings by Indigenous Canadian artist Kent Monkman, on view through August 16, 2026. The exhibition, organized in partnership with the Denver Art Museum and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, marks the only Midwest stop for the traveling show.

Monkman, a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation in Manitoba, draws on the visual language of 19th-century settler landscape painters such as Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church, transforming their compositional conventions to center Indigenous subjects and experiences. Works in the exhibition run up to seven feet high by ten feet wide, a scale Monkman has said is deliberate: “Large paintings have this authority that is what I wanted to invest my work with,” he noted, describing his intent to grant Indigenous historical experiences the same visual weight as the colonial canvases he references.

Throughout the exhibition, Monkman deploys his recurring alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a gender-fluid figure who appears across multiple canvases. One centerpiece work depicts Miss Chief painting Lieutenant Colonel George Custer and the 7th Cavalry within a romanticized frontier landscape. More recent paintings document the violence of government-sponsored residential schools in Canada and the United States — a subject with personal resonance for Monkman, whose grandmother attended a Canadian residential school. Other works honor Indigenous scholars, activists, and artists, responding to calls to build monuments celebrating Indigenous communities.

Denver Art Museum curator John Lukavic described Monkman’s approach as using colonial visual language specifically to “flip the power dynamics” in art historical authorship. The exhibition runs at the Akron Art Museum, located at 1 South High Street in Akron, through August 16.

Source: Ideastream Public Media