The Denver Art Museum is taking a genuine risk with its new solo show by painter Kent Monkman, though not for the reasons you might think.

The show is racy — lots of breasts and butts — and violent, radical, topical, lurid, melodramatic and “woke” in a way that was trendy a year ago but has suddenly become taboo (even dangerous?) under the current conservative political administration. DAM knows it is trekking into shaky terrain here, far enough that it put a written warning on the front door of the gallery, encouraging parents to check out the contents themselves before bringing their kids along.

But the bigger bet is on Monkman himself. The painter, who wears both his queer and Indigenous identities on his sensational sleeves, has been an art world celebrity for more than a decade. This is his first full-blown survey at a major art museum in the United States.

It took a while for this to happen. One reason may be that it can be difficult to discern how seriously his work ought to be taken. On a visual level, the material is so over-the-top, so larger-than-life, so reliant on punchlines and superfluous shocks that it challenges conventional ideas about what belongs in a museum and what does not. It is the very definition of “camp” — theatrical, exaggerated, loud, attitude-y, super-gay — and there has always been disagreement on the bona fides of such material.

On an intellectual level, it makes important points, the sort you cannot disagree with unless you are truly stupid and choose to stay that way. Colonialism devastated human cultures in the Americas. The pain of racism is brutal and enduring. History is full of lies. In that regard, Monkman’s objects are, indeed, deadly serious stuff.

For sure, this is a show to see. “History is Painted by the Victors,” as the exhibit is titled, includes 41 colorful and exciting works, and every one of them will get your heart racing. It is impossible to stand before Monkman’s large acrylic paintings — one of them is 11 feet tall and 22 feet wide — and not be overwhelmed by the bright hues, the action, the dare.

Monkman’s method is to make grandiose historical references to the styles of painters past — superstars of American art like Albert Bierstadt — and then change the narrative, giving voice to folks whose viewpoints on a particular scene were left out.

For example, in the 2013 work titled “History is Painted by the Victors,” from which the overall exhibit gets its name, Monkman paints a background reminiscent of the lush and luminous mountain scenes that were Bierstadt’s trademark in the mid-1800s. It is the kind of scenery that art museum regulars — especially those who frequent DAM, with its deep collection of Western art from that era — are accustomed to seeing.

But in the foreground, Monkman shakes things up. There are soldiers frolicking naked together on the shores of a lake, a reference to the paintings of Thomas Eakins. In the center of the work, we see the figure of a painter — who appears to be both dark-skinned and transsexual and outfitted in thigh-high red leather boots — capturing the scene on an easel set up on a tripod. She, or they, is in control of how this moment will be recorded for posterity. Bierstadt is not silenced exactly, but his perspective fades into the forest and a richer dialogue emerges.

Monkman takes on other familiar artists in this exhibit. He forces us to rethink the vantage points of non-native Western art icons like painters George Catlin and Paul Kane, and the photographer Edward S. Curtis, but also romantic masters of that century, such as Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix. Monkman’s 2010 painting “Sunday in the Park” is a remake of artist Georges Seurat’s beloved “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” only in this version the famous umbrellas that appear in the scene are carried by humans who appear to be both Indigenous and nonbinary. It is their story now, not Seurat’s.

The first half of the exhibit, “History Is Painted by the Victors” — co-curated by DAM’s John P. Lukavic and Léuli Eshraghi of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts — includes multiple versions of this concept of narrative remix, and it is the crowd-pleasing part. The second half moves decidedly into the present, with paintings that address more current events.

The art history references remain, and are often refined, but the topics transition toward the horrid mistreatment of native peoples by governments in the past century. There are scenes of Native American children forced into boarding schools, the oppression of women, of protesters being attacked by police. Monkman covers a lot of ground and records for history, many legitimate transgressions.

On a lighter side, there are a series of paintings making visible queer and trans people from the past who were largely invisible in the output of artists over time. Monkman makes his point in works like 2017’s “Saturnalia,” which depicts an orgy of (and forgive the made-up words here) homo-erotic, trans-erotic, nature-erotic debauchery and lust taking place between cross-dressing cowboys and Indians.

Well-known Western painters like Frederic Remington and Charles Marion Russell never would have included these folks in their scenes — even though queer, non-binary and two-spirit humans undoubtedly existed then. Monkman’s West is wilder — and then some.

But those earlier painters and their peers tended to avoid painting the sort of bawdy jokes into their scenes that are Monkman’s calling card. They depicted cowboys saddled up and ready for hard labor, soldiers engaged in heroic battle, native people in pride-inducing regalia.

They got a lot of things wrong, no doubt, and their characters were often one-dimensional, and their perspectives deserve the suspicion they get in today’s more-aware social atmosphere. But their intention was to capture dignity, integrity.

Monkman’s own heroes, the ones he recasts into old and familiar settings, like Beirstadt’s, can come off as ridiculous, aimless, horny. They are not going about their day so much as they are wasting it away sitting in the sun half-naked, simply strutting their stuff and flaunting their sexual selves. Is there dignity in that?

In some ways, yes. Partying through pain is a legit part of the queer perspective of life. It deserves respect. But, in other ways, no. Their dance and do-it attitude can make them appear frivolous — and one-dimensional in their own way.

That is why viewers of Monkman’s work question the painter’s own frivolity. Where is he serious, where is he playing politics, how much is he playing us?

And that is one of the things that makes this elevation of his work such a dare itself. DAM is arguing for something like greatness here. Some will disagree.

Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver-based freelance writer specializing in fine arts.