Does asinnajaq’s name sound familiar? You may recognize her from this painting by Kent Monkman that we purchased last year. Monkman first met asinnajaq when she received an award named after him for best experimental work for her film “Three Thousand” at the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival in Toronto in 2017. The two got to know each other better in 2019 at the 58th Venice Biennale, which featured Monkman’s work and where asinnajaq co-curated an exhibition as part of the artists’ collective Isuma. Monkman’s painting of asinnajaq is part of “wâsê- acâhkosak” (“Shining Stars”), a series of portraits commemorating Indigenous friends, collaborators and heroes whom he admires for their creativity, leadership and resistance against colonial systems.
Kent Monkman (Fisher River Cree Nation, born 1965), “asinnajaq,” from the “ ᐋᐧᓭ ᐊᒑᐦᑯᐢᐊᐠ wâsê-acâhkosak (Shining Stars)” Portrait Series, 2020. Acrylic on canvas, 60 3/16 × 40 3/16 inches. Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Museum purchase with funds provided by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. 2024.132.
“Visually, the paintings evoke the stately style of Western art history portraiture to canonize Indigenous sitters into cultural memory. This series honours the resilience of my Indigenous heroes with exalted and immortalizing portraits that offer a constructive response to Canada’s monuments to colonial leaders. The portraits refute the colonial imperative of disappearing Indigenous people, and also reject the superficial form of immortalization offered by settler artists such as George Catlin, who sought to freeze ‘authentic’ specimens of Indigenous people in time capsule portraits. These paintings are love letters to my friends and collaborators and highlight their individuality, honouring their lives, leadership, and legacies.” — Kent Monkman
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