Artist as Disruptor

The art of Indigenous painter Ken Monkman has shaken and shocked both the Canadian art world and the political world. Monkman is a visual disrupter at the intersection of art, history, sexuality and politics. To be a creative disrupter is to take familiar images and insert the unfamiliar. In so doing the observer is shocked out of the expected and into a new perception of reality. Monkman’s paintings have inspired a new way of seeing Canadian history and its relationship with Indigenous people.