Shame and Prejudice

Artist Kent Monkman's all-encompassing project, Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, takes viewers on a journey through Canada's history, starting in the present and going back before Canadian confederation. Throughout the book there are clever albeit controversial commentaries told by Monkman's genderfluid, time-travelling, supernatural alter-ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Her narratives takes viewers through the history of New France and the fur trade, the nineteenth-century dispossession of Indigenous lands through Canadian colonial policies, the horrors of the residential school system, and modern Indigenous experiences in urban environments. Shame and Prejudice challenges predominant narratives of Canadian history and honours the resilience of Indigenous peoples. This book accompanies Monkman's largest solo exhibition to date, which is currently travelling across Canada at venues including the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. The exhibition includes the artist's own paintings, drawings, and sculptural works, which form a dialogue with historical artefacts and artworks borrowed from museums and private collections across Canada. The book is trilingual with all text in English, French and Cree.
Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience takes readers through artist Kent Monkman's largest solo exhibition to date, which challenges predominant narratives of Canada's history, and honors the resilience of its original inhabitants.
Kent Monkman is a Canadian artist of Cree ancestry who is widely known for his provocative interventions into Western European and North American art history. He works with a variety of mediums, including painting, film/video, performance, and installation, and has exhibited at major museums worldwide, including the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and the Palais de Tokyo and Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris. In 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City commissioned Monkman to create two large-scale paintings that went on display in the museum's Great Hall.