Monkman
  • Monkman
Recently, after Dan Savage failed to purchase this painting, some readers took offense at its depiction of native people—but another reader sent us a tip to take a look at Cree/Irish Canadian artist Kent Monkman. You can lose yourself in his giant, classically sublime landscapes—and then you notice the tiny little transgender cowboys and Indians fucking in the foregrounds, wearing what can only be described as post-Cher getups.

Dan points out it might be a nice jolt to see Monkman in and among all the sweeping waterfalls and babbling brooks at the Frye Art Museum, which specializes in the 19th-century German landscapes. Monkman's most direct references are the 19th-century American Hudson River Schoolers, folks like Bierstadt and Cole, who are infamous for making dramatic portraits of specific places that in fact look nothing like those places. SAM's Puget Sound painting by Bierstadt—Bierstadt had never been here when he painted it—is a perfect example of the way romanticism swallows its subjects (women, native people, landscapes) in the name of elevating them.

Miller
  • Miller
The way Monkman sneaks his campy subjects right into the laps of history paintings reminds me of a photograph by Seattle artist Steven Miller that's up at SOIL Gallery this month. It's a photograph of an insanely lush green Northwest forest, with two men making out in one corner. You don't notice them at first, then you notice only them, then you settle into some balance between these men and their surrounding. The photograph's title is Fecundity, equating the bloom of the scene to the bloom of human sexuality taking place—gasp!—outside reproduction.

Another of Miller's photographs at SOIL, which pictures two men making out in the middle of the back of a city bus, makes the opposite juxtaposition between environment and subject. Here, the lovers aren't caught in a private moment but performing in a public place. The title is the artist's voice, maybe speaking to the ladies on the bus: If You See It, Darling, Then It's There.

Thanks for the tip, Erin!