Cree artist Kent Monkman has unveiled his first public sculpture, The Colony (2026), a permanent bronze-and-steel work on Toronto's revitalised Port Lands waterfront. Installed at Biidaasige Park as part of the new Lassonde Art Trail, the roughly 12-foot-tall arched structure takes the form of a modern condominium, but its residents are beavers, each about four feet tall and caught in a different playful pursuit. Monkman, best known for provocative figurative paintings that rework Western art history and colonial narratives, had long resisted public art. He told The Art Newspaper he was unsure how to translate his vision from drawing into another medium, noting that outdoor work is more exposed and its audience does not choose to encounter it. The Lassonde team persuaded him to take the leap. Fabricated with the Toronto foundry MST Bronze, the piece draws on an 18th-century engraving by Veremondo Rossi showing beavers sheltering in an apartment-like lodge while pursued by Indigenous hunters, an image Monkman has referenced before. The beaver is a loaded emblem. The animals were a form of currency in the North American fur trade, hunted to near devastation amid competition between French and British colonists in which Indigenous peoples were also players. "I like to think of beavers as standing in for the history of why this became a British colony instead of French," Monkman said. The site added another layer: Biidaasige Park sits on remediated land where the mouth of the Don River was rerouted. "That's essentially what beavers do. They redirect water, create ecosystems," he said. Inside the condo, beavers dance, read, drum and peer through a telescope, a nod to Indigenous star stories, their exaggerated expressions carrying the humour Monkman considers essential to his practice. "Humour makes us Cree, makes us human," he said. The commission is one of two permanent works on the two-and-a-half-mile trail, funded by a C$25m donation from Pierre Lassonde within a C$1.4bn waterfront revitalisation; Portuguese sculptor Joana Vasconcelos created the other permanent piece.