SAN DIEGO, CALIF.- Reconsidering Bierstadt is the latest in an ongoing series of curatorial projects which highlight the relationships between cutting-edge contemporary art and the outstanding permanent collection of the Timken Museum of Art. Previous projects have looked at Rembrandt through the eyes of Dutch photographer/videographer, Rineke Dijsktra, and at the portrait practice of Anthony van Dyck through the vibrant work of Kehinde Wiley.

Beginning March 26 and running through June 8, 2025, the Timken’s American Gallery will be transformed by a staged encounter between the 19th-century American painter Albert Bierstadt and the First Nation (Cree) Canadian artist, Kent Monkman. In this season of renewal and rebirth, Reconsidering Bierstadt offers visitors the opportunity to freshly compare one of the Timken’s most beloved works, Cho-Looke, The Yosemite Fall (1864) with The Fourth World, a recent, challenging depiction of California’s historical landscape by Monkman.

“Reconsidering Bierstadt represents the first time that Monkman’s work has been shown publicly in San Diego,” stated Derrick R. Cartwright, PhD, director of curatorial affairs at the Timken. “His large-scale compositions have been the subject of exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Musée des Beaux-Arts Montreal, among other international venues. This April, a mid-career retrospective, Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors, opens at the Denver Art Museum.”

Cartwright continued: “The Timken is proud to showcase this rising star and is grateful to the Denver Art Museum for lending its important painting, The Fourth World, so that San Diegans can enjoy this unique project. Monkman provokes viewers to rethink Bierstadt’s 19th-century representation of explorers enjoying the rustic splendors of their campsite in an Edenic setting.”

As Bierstadt’s title makes clear (Cho-Looke is the Ahwaneechee name for the natural wonder, Yosemite Falls), this landscape was settled by indigenous people long before Bierstadt and his colleagues arrived in the valley. The dialogue between Bierstadt’s and Monkman’s representations—the first time these two works have ever been shown together—raises complex issues, among them the privileged viewpoints of artists in shaping notions about the land and its stewardship.

Known for thought-provoking interventions into Western European and American art history, Monkman often explores themes of colonization, sexuality, loss and resilience—the complexities of historic and contemporary Indigenous experiences across a variety of media, including painting, film/video, performance and installation. Monkman is renowned for his works that invert familiar tropes of natural wonder and Manifest Destiny (the belief in 19th- century United States that American settlers were destined to expand westward across North America), always with a sense of humor and pointed satire.

Born in 1965, Kent Monkman is a member of Fisher River Cree Nation in Treaty 5 Territory (Manitoba, Canada). He lives and works between New York City and Toronto. His work has been widely collected in both Canada and the United States and can be found in the permanent collections of many museums, including the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Smithsonian, Washington, DC), Denver Art Museum and Hood Museum of Art (Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH).

Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) was born in Germany and immigrated to the United States as a child. Best known for his dramatic landscapes, Bierstadt’s mature paintings often idealized the American wilderness. He earned his initial popularity with a series of landscape paintings of the Rocky Mountains created while he was part of the Lander Expedition in 1859. In 1863, he set out with a group of artists on the second of many western trips he took. During his time in California, he took inspiration from Yosemite Falls to create the painting now in San Diego.