It feels amazing — and a bit overwhelming — for Shelley Niro to see her work installed throughout the first floor of the Art Gallery of Hamilton. To think: until recently, some of it had been hanging in her living room.
The Mohawk artist from Six Nations of the Grand River is the subject of a major retrospective currently touring North America called Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch. The exhibition completes its Canadian premiere at the Art Gallery of Hamilton this weekend after a grand opening last year at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. Next month, it will travel to the National Gallery of Canada, then it’s off to the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Remai Modern in Saskatoon after that.
It’s a major moment for a figure who’s important to the art of Turtle Island. And one that’s long overdue, says Art Gallery of Hamilton senior curator Melissa Bennett, one of three curators behind the exhibition.
“To find a moment to gather, organize and clearly articulate the breadth, the length of time and the depth of what she’s doing, it just had to be done.”
500 Year Itch surveys Niro’s career over four decades, revealing a bold artistic voice that’s by turns funny, big-hearted, mischievous, incisive and hopeful, with a deep commitment to history as well as tremendous love for family, community and culture.
With more than 100 individual pieces to experience, here’s a small selection of iconic works from the exhibition to better acquaint you with the exceptional art of Shelley Niro.
The Rebel (1982)
Long before art school, Niro honed her skills as a photographer walking around Six Nations with her camera. “Her first subjects were her family,” says Bennett. And as Niro turned to art-making to express her worldview, her family and friends became some of her most important collaborators, appearing in many significant artworks.
The earliest work included in the exhibition, The Rebel represents a starting point. It was a sunny spring day, the artist remembers, when she was visiting her mom. “I said let me take a picture of you, Mom. So she jumped on the car and posed like that.” The photo shows Niro’s middle-aged mother, June Chiquita Doxtater, reclining on the trunk of a muscular automobile, like a car show model. The vehicle’s nameplate, visible just beneath Doxtater, reads “Rebel,” which is a bit of “poetic justice,” Niro says.
Besides a loving tribute and some spontaneous fun, the photograph asks big questions, the curator says, regarding the values placed on women’s bodies — especially the bodies of Indigenous women — as well as standards of beauty and femininity as they relate to age and race.
The Shirt (2003)
According to Bennett, The Shirt is “classic Niro” — ironic, witty and “by the time it sinks in, it’s as sharp as a knife.” Using humour to disarm the audience, its message “cuts deeper.”
Across a series of lightboxes, the photo essay shows Seminole, Muscogee and Diné artist Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie standing in three-quarter-length portrait wearing a succession of novelty T-shirts that outline the atrocities Indigenous peoples experienced at the hands of colonizers. Its false punchline says, “And all’s I get is this shirt,” before a subsequent photo of Tsinhnahjinnie standing shirtless suggests she doesn’t even get that, with a settler model (played by Tsinhnahjinnie’s wife, Veronica Passalacqua) replacing her in the final frame. A video version of the work was shown at the 2003 Venice Biennale.
“It’s just such a simple format,” Niro says. “But it’s unexpected. So it feels safe for people to view it.”
Waitress (1987)
One of the earliest oil paintings included in the show, Waitress shows the artist as the titular server spilling a glass of wine on a customer. Meanwhile, then-prime minister Brian Mulroney and his wife Mila dance in the background, ignorant to the challenges of Indigenous people in Canada.
“Whenever you read a story about native people,” Niro says, “they always emphasized welfare, drug and alcohol issues — just really the bleakest of images. But I was thinking, ‘You know, we’re really working our butts off here!’ We’re trying to keep our lives together, keep food on the table, keep everything going all at once. And when I did waitressing — I was a very bad waitress — but I was working my butt off. So that’s me.”
1779 (2017)
The artist, who was born in Niagara Falls, N.Y., says the Falls hold a special place in her heart. “When you go there now, it’s so crass and loud and crowded; you have to find your own way to look at the Falls, so that it is a meaningful, spiritual place.” Niagara Falls has long been a sacred place for the Haudenosaunee people. It’s also a place where a brutal history hides in plain sight.
Niro’s multimedia installation 1779 tells the story of the Sullivan campaign, when, during the American Revolution, George Washington ordered the violent expulsion of the Haudenosaunee from present-day New York state. “They went through and burned everything — orchards, longhouses — just to get rid of Six Nations,” Niro says. The survivors, led by women who sustained the communities, fled northward to Fort Niagara.
Atop the artwork’s pedestal, strands of beads cascade from a pair of stiletto heels in imitation of the Falls. They stand on a small video screen that shows the churning Niagara Whirlpool. “To me, it just looks like chaos and conflict,” the artist says. “So you get this beautiful Niagara Falls sitting on top of the chaos and conflict set around … It’s just a big toe in the water of history.”
Honey Moccasin (1998)
Her first independently produced longform narrative film — “not quite a feature” at 49 minutes, the artist says — Honey Moccasin is a campy, experimental and all-Indigenous whodunnit that wouldn’t appear out of place screened next to the stylized melodramas of David Lynch. Borrowing the grab-bag aesthetic of cable access television, the film includes musical numbers, performance art and a fashion show, alongside twin plot lines about rival bars on the fictional Grand Pine Indian Reserve and a drag queen who steals powwow regalia.
“It’s super quirky,” Bennett says. “It’s absolutely not sitting in the mainstream — at the time or now.” Despite these idiosyncrasies, Honey Moccasin considers themes prevalent throughout Niro’s practice, like community, authenticity and expectation. The artist has since made three feature-length films, including the latest, Café Daughter, from 2023.
Five Hundred Year Itch (1992)
In this photograph (from which the exhibition takes its title), Niro becomes the iconic blonde bombshell to recreate one of the most famous scenes in movie history — an overturned desk fan replacing Marilyn Monroe’s drafty subway grate. The title of Monroe’s The Seven Year Itch refers to the idea that divorce rates peak in the seventh year of marriage. That’s when partners ask themselves, “Will I stay with this marriage or will I leave?” the artist explains.
Niro’s photograph was made in 1992, 500 years after Christopher Columbus reached the Americas. “So it’s like the marriage between native people and the colonizers. Are we going to stick with this or what are we going to do? How [are we] going to resolve the issues that have showed up in these last 500 years?”
The photograph comes from a larger body of work called This Land is Mime Land. Consisting of a series of triptych photographs, each set contrasts an image of Niro costumed as a figure from pop culture (like Elvis, Snow White or a crew member from Star Trek) with an image from her family photo album as well as a plain black-and-white studio portrait of the artist. The juxtaposition attempts to tease out some of the tensions that forge identity, from the impacts of dominant culture to the legacies of our families, communities and ancestors. “To get to me,” the artist explains, “you have to have a combination of the contemporary, historical and personal.”
Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch closes May 26 at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. It runs June 21 – Aug. 25 at the National Gallery of Canada.