From the earliest days of his career, Kent Monkman has been a master of pastiche in many media, borrowing from the tropes of art history, including the landscape paintings of the Hudson River School, early cinema, and the nineteenth-century daguerreotypes of Indigenous touring performers in the popular Wild West shows. This painting is part of Monkman’s ongoing reimagining of the history of North America. The artist’s alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, rides in on horseback to deliver the arrow of desire to a hunky cowboy, while a gay marriage unfolds in the foreground. Monkman’s Wedding at Sodom commemorates the early nineteenth-century “rendezvous” that took place in the American West in which settler and Indigenous merchants, ministers, traders, and fur trappers would meet to trade and mingle, sometimes for rowdy weeks on end. Monkman gives the rendezvous a two-spirited spin, suggesting that these gatherings offered many settler men liberation from the repressive confines of European gender and social roles. A subtle note of tragedy is struck in the figure of the young Indigenous woman being carried off at right, an early victim of the smallpox epidemics that swept through Indigenous communities following contact with settlers.
