Kent Monkman: Officer and Laughing Girl

Kent Monkman creates new paintings responding to Vermeer's Officer and Laughing Girl, examining colonial narratives in 17th-century European art.

Why go

Monkman's practice interrogates how canonical European paintings like Vermeer's Officer and Laughing Girl encoded colonial power and global trade; this installation uses the Frick's own Vermeer as a direct point of departure, making visible the hidden histories embedded in Old Master works.

What to expect

New paintings by Kent Monkman installed in dialogue with the Frick's Vermeer Officer and Laughing Girl, exploring how 17th-century Dutch art represented colonization and global trade from an Indigenous perspective.

Things to know

• Kent Monkman is a Canadian contemporary artist born in 1965.
• The exhibition takes inspiration from the Frick's Vermeer painting Officer and Laughing Girl (ca. 1657).
• Monkman's practice explores historic European art and narratives from an Indigenous perspective.
• The Frick Collection holds three paintings by Johannes Vermeer.

Plan your visit

Timed tickets are recommended. Members visit free with no reservations required.

From the venue

The Frick Collection will present an installation of new paintings by the contemporary artist Kent Monkman (b. Canada, 1965), whose practice explores historic European art and narratives from an Indigenous perspective. For this project, Monkman takes inspiration from Officer and Laughing Girl (ca. 1657)—one of the Frick's three paintings by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer—to probe the ways in which it and other artworks of its time represented the effects of global trade and colonization.