Kent Monkman

Death of Adonis

As described by the artist, Death of Adonis is both a challenge and an homage to a painting made over a century before it: Alfred Bierstadt’s 1888 The Last of the Buffalo. The mournful scene in Bierstadt’s painting veils the true cause of the then-looming buffalo extinction at the hands of settler colonizers moving west. Bierstadt visually links the masses of dead and dying buffalo with the supposed fate of Indigenous nations, perpetuating the myth of a “vanishing race.”

In Death of Adonis, Monkman refers to and challenges Bierstadt’s work by recasting the characters in the allegorical scene. In lieu of the anonymous, mounted Indigenous hunter in Bierstadt’s painting, Monkman portrays the hunter as a blonde cowboy struggling on horseback. In the foreground of the image, the artist’s alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, kneels over the body of a man who was killed in the buffalo hunt, just as Aphrodite kneeled over the body of her slain lover Adonis.

Miss Chief often appears in Monkman’s works as the Cree trickster figure Wesakechak, a mischievous yet benevolent, time-traveling shapeshifter. In his paintings that cite canonical works, Miss Chief responds to history from within them, revealing fault lines of colonial violence, rearranging power dynamics, and holding space for ambivalence and contradiction.