A Dutch officer in a broad hat, a young woman laughing at a table, light falling through a window, a map on the wall: Johannes Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl, painted around 1657, is one of the quietest and most intimate pictures in New York. From 12 November 2026, it has company. In its Cabinet Gallery, The Frick Collection presents “Kent Monkman: Officer and Laughing Girl”, a series of new paintings that respond directly to the Vermeer. The installation runs until 22 February 2027.
Who is Kent Monkman?
Born in Canada in 1965, Kent Monkman is a member of Fisher River Cree Nation and divides his time between Toronto and New York. For years he has revisited the canon of European painting from an Indigenous point of view, often borrowing the grand formats and compositions of the Old Masters and filling them with stories that those masters left out. His work is held by major museums, and in 2019 he made two monumental paintings for the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Enter Miss Chief
At the centre of the Frick project, as so often in Monkman’s work, stands Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, his time-travelling, shapeshifting and gender-fluid alter ego. In the new paintings she moves through some five hundred years of encounters between Indigenous and European people, together with the cultural, technological and environmental changes those encounters brought. The tone is typical of the artist: humorous and theatrical on the surface, rigorously researched underneath.
What lies behind a quiet interior
The starting point is not arbitrary. Vermeer’s scene looks private, but the world of the 1650s was being reshaped by Dutch trade and colonial expansion – the map on the wall and the beaver-felt hat of the officer are reminders of those global networks. Monkman uses the painting as a door into that larger history, asking what forces stood outside the room while the young woman laughed.
The museum has designed the visit as a dialogue: after the installation, visitors are invited to walk to the South Hall in the permanent collection to see the Vermeer that inspired the series. The Frick owns three paintings by Vermeer, and this one has a story of its own – for a time in the nineteenth century it circulated in London under the name of Pieter de Hooch.
After New York
The exhibition will travel to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick. A bilingual English and Canadian French catalogue accompanies it, with texts by Monkman, Frick chief curator Aimee Ng and Emma Hassencahl-Perley, curator of Indigenous art at the Beaverbrook.
For anyone who thinks they know Vermeer, this small show is an invitation to look again – and to notice who is missing from the picture.