Shelley Niro
Delivering serious messages using mischief and humour.
Shelley Niro, “The 500 Year Itch” from “This Land Is Mime Land” series (detail), 1992
hand-tinted gelatin silver prints in hand-drilled mat board, 37" x 22" (National Gallery of Canada)
Throughout her four-decades-long career, Shelley Niro has created art that reflects the many ways Indigenous people have been shortchanged. Never grim or boring, Niro combines profound messages with loads of mischief and splashes of pizzazz. The proof can be found in her internationally touring retrospective, Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch.
Included in the exhibition are works from Niro’s first solo show in 1992 at Toronto’s Mercer Union, an artist-run centre. There, the Brantford, Ont., artist unveiled Mohawks in Beehives, a kitsch collection of hand-painted photographs begun in 1982 that show Niro’s three adult sisters, dolled up with big hair and makeup, frolicking on the streets of Brantford.
In some photos, the women pose outrageously like high-fashion models. One subset of photos, Red Heels Hard, shows them wearing red shoes on a yellow brick road. But we know their story will not end like that of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, who only had to click the heels of her red shoes to make her dreams come true.
Shelley Niro, “Abnormally Aboriginal,” 2014 (2022 reprint)
colour inkjet prints, 54" x 34" each (collection of the artist)
500 Year Itch is a joint project of the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, with curatorial assistance from the National Gallery of Canada. The exhibition honours Niro, a member of the Six Nations Reserve, Bay of Quinte Kanien’kehà:ka Nation, Turtle Clan, and one of the country’s most decorated artists. In 2017, she received both a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and the Scotiabank Photography Award.
The show, on view until Jan. 1 in New York, moves to Hamilton in February, and then to the National Gallery in Ottawa, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Remai Modern in Saskatoon. Its title is borrowed from one of Niro’s most iconic photographs, The 500 Year Itch, created in 1992, the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus landing in the Americas.
Shelley Niro, “500 Year Itch,” 2023
detail of installation at National Museum of the American Indian, New York (photo by Liz Ligon for NMAI)
In that photo, the artist dons a white dress, similar to one worn by Marilyn Monroe in her 1955 film, The Seven Year Itch. In that famous image, Monroe stands on a subway grate as a passing underground train pushes air upwards, raising her skirt provocatively. A coy-looking Niro replicated that pose by placing a fan on the floor.
Niro’s image packs a double whammy. One of the show’s curators, Melissa Bennett, who works at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, calls it “a cheeky jab” that “explores the idea of women’s bodies as available for public consumption.” But the image is also part of a photographic series called This Land Is Mime Land, in which Niro poses as archetypal figures from pop culture, including Elvis Presley, Santa Claus and the Statue of Liberty. She demonstrates “the culture of the conquerors offers little and much of it is toxic, despite its promises,” says David W. Penny, a curator at the New York museum.
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Shelley Niro, “500 Year Itch,” 2023, detail of installation at National Museum of the American Indian, New York (photo by Liz Ligon for NMAI)
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Shelley Niro, “500 Year Itch,” 2023, detail of installation at National Museum of the American Indian, New York (photo by Liz Ligon for NMAI)
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Shelley Niro, “500 Year Itch,” 2023, detail of installation at National Museum of the American Indian, New York (photo by Liz Ligon for NMAI)
Greg Hill, the National Gallery’s former senior Indigenous curator, also helped organize the exhibition. But he was fired last year, along with three other senior staff, amid a drive to decolonize the Ottawa institution. The gallery has refused to say whether Hill will return, as Niro hopes, to supervise the Ottawa iteration.
Niro’s photographs are her best-known works. But the show also includes sculptures, films, beadworks and paintings, including her Skywoman works, which plumb Indigenous stories.
Shelley Niro, “Waitress,” 1987, oil on canvas, 48" x 36" (Art Gallery of Hamilton, purchase, permanent collection fund, 2021)
One of Niro’s most provocative paintings is Waitress. In this 1987 image, a woman who looks much like Niro, serves a meal and spills – accidentally, or perhaps, on purpose – a glass of red wine onto a white female customer. Behind them, Brian Mulroney, then prime minister, and his wife, Mila, dance merrily, seemingly oblivious to the suffering of Indigenous people, who are represented by a series of mask-like faces in the background. “Niro was thinking about how Indigenous peoples were being ignored by those in power,” Bennett writes in the exhibition catalogue. The painting’s message is blunter and more obvious than what is generally found in Niro’s humorous photographs.
Shelley Niro, “The Rebel,” 1987 (2022 reprint), hand-tinted gelatin silver print, 10" x 14" (collection of the artist)
Consider another iconic photo, The Rebel, in which Niro’s mother, Chiquita Doxtater, poses seductively on the trunk of a rusting Rambler Rebel. The scene offers a different take on the familiar advertising ploy of having a sexy young woman sprawl across the hood of a new car.
“Objectifying herself for the camera, with a big, lipsticked smile, she knowingly mocks the expectations of women’s bodies, especially those of Indigenous women,” writes Bennett. “Enacted as a quick joke between mother and daughter, this image lives on as a banner call for both women’s rights and Indigenous self-determination.”
The photograph, like so much of Niro’s work, makes space for the often-silenced voices of Indigenous women and is delivered, as usual, with flair and puckish humour. ■
Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York from May 27, 2023, to Jan. 1, 2024; the Art Gallery of Hamilton from Feb. 10 to May 26, 2024; the National Gallery of Canada from June 14 to Aug. 18, 2024; the Vancouver Art Gallery from Sept. 21, 2024, to Feb. 2, 2025; and the Remai Modern in Saskatoon in the spring of 2025.
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