Happy City News has a joyful date for art lovers: The Frick Collection will present Kent Monkman: Officer and Laughing Girl, an installation of brand-new paintings in its intimate Cabinet Gallery, from November 12, 2026, to February 22, 2027.
Kent Monkman, born in Canada in 1965, is celebrated for exploring historic European art and its stories from an Indigenous perspective, always with humor, elegance and deeply researched imagery. For this project he takes inspiration from Officer and Laughing Girl (about 1657), one of the three beloved paintings by the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer in the Frick’s collection, and looks at how artworks of that era reflected the effects of global trade and colonization.
Guided by his alter ego, Miss Chief — a time-traveling, shapeshifting and ever-glamorous character — Monkman imagines how Indigenous and European encounters evolved over the last five centuries, along with their cultural, technological and environmental changes. And there is a delightful extra: after the installation, visitors can stroll to the nearby South Hall to admire the original Vermeer that inspired the series, hanging in the permanent collection galleries.
The show will be accompanied by a bilingual English–Canadian French catalogue and will later travel to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, Canada. It is a perfect fall plan on Museum Mile: one great painting, one bold contemporary voice, and a conversation across centuries that leaves you smiling.
Photo: Kent Monkman Studio, courtesy of The Frick Collection
