Officer and Laughing Girl: New Amsterdam, 2026, is an exclusive limited-edition artwork created in response to the artist’s solo exhibition Kent Monkman: Officer and Laughing Girl at The Frick Collection, on view from November 12, 2026, to February 22, 2027. Taking inspiration from Johannes Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl (ca. 1657), one of the Frick’s three paintings by the seventeenth-century Dutch master, Monkman revisits the celebrated composition to examine the histories of global trade, colonialism and cultural exchange through an Indigenous perspective.

With his characteristic humour and deeply researched iconography, Monkman introduces his time-travelling, shapeshifting alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, in the role of the Laughing Girl in this series. Through this intervention, he imagines the evolution of Indigenous and European encounters over five centuries, bringing together references to different eras and the cultural, technological and environmental changes that have shaped them. New Amsterdam, the first work in the series, focuses on a 17th century encounter between Miss Chief and an officer in the Dutch settlement of New Netherland.

Replacing Vermeer’s map in Monkman’s composition is Miss Chief’s Winter Count on buffalo hide. The pictographs are inspired by the lexicon of historical Plains Indigenous winter counts, visual records in which communities demarcated a significant event to represent each year. Miss Chief’s Winter Count records events from her millennia-long existence as related in The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island, written by Monkman and Gisèle Gordon. Other details in the composition such as the officer’s beaver hat, Miss Chief’s pearl jewelry and the gold coins on the table between them draw attention to the networks of trade and colonial expansion embedded within the visual language of Dutch Golden Age art.

Bringing the traditions of Old Master painting into dialogue with contemporary art, Officer and Laughing Girl: New Amsterdam reflects Monkman's ongoing practice of challenging Western representations of Indigenous peoples and their histories. Using its proprietary Hi-Rnd© technology, LITO captures the texture, colour, relief and brushstrokes of the original artwork at multiple scales. Reimagined as a limited-edition work printed on mirrored alu dibond, the edition introduces a reflective surface to highlight key elements in the composition and invite a renewed encounter between the historical image and the viewer.