Kent Monkman: Officer and Laughing Girl at The Frick Collection

The Frick Collection will present an installation of new paintings by Kent Monkman (b. Canada, 1965) in its intimate Cabinet Gallery, from November 12, 2026 to February 22, 2027.

Monkman's work revisits historic European art and its narratives from an Indigenous perspective. The starting point here is Officer and Laughing Girl (ca. 1657), one of three Vermeer paintings in the Frick's collection. Monkman uses it to ask how Dutch art of the seventeenth century pictured the effects of global trade and colonization, and what those pictures leave out.

Guiding the series is Miss Chief, the artist's alter ego: a time-traveling, shapeshifting, gender-fluid figure. Through her, Monkman imagines how encounters between Indigenous and European peoples have unfolded across five centuries, along with the cultural, technological and environmental changes that followed. The paintings combine humor, a distinctive style and carefully researched iconography.

The visit is designed to connect old and new. After the installation, visitors can walk to the South Hall in the permanent collection galleries and see the Vermeer that inspired the project.

The exhibition will travel from New York to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. A bilingual English–Canadian French catalogue accompanies it, with texts by Monkman, Aimee Ng, the Frick's Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, and Emma Hassencahl-Perley, Curator of Indigenous Art at the Beaverbrook.

Leadership support comes from Rosamond Ivey and the Henry Luce Foundation, with additional support from Dr. Taiheng Cheng and from Sandra Wijnberg and Hugh Freund. Timed tickets are recommended, and members visit free without a reservation. The Frick is at 1 East 70th Street.