Curator’s Absence Removes 'Joy' of National Gallery Show: Shelley Niro
Shelley Niro
Shelley Niro, one of this country’s most decorated Indigenous artists, fears she could be collateral damage in what has been nicknamed a “palace purge” at the National Gallery of Canada.
An international touring retrospective for the multimedia Mohawk artist from Brantford, Ont., is scheduled to land at the National Gallery in the summer of 2024. But there’s a problem: The gallery’s senior Indigenous curator, Greg Hill, who was stickhandling the Ottawa iteration of the show, was cut loose last week along with three other senior managers, including deputy director and chief curator Kitty Scott.
“I’m sure the firing of Greg Hill will have an impact on the exhibition,” Niro said in an interview. “It will remove the joy I would have felt with the exhibition knowing Greg is not there.”
Greg Hill (courtesy LinkedIn)
In the public service, people declared “surplus,” as Hill was, are not supposed to be replaced; their job is supposed to disappear. But as two retired public service human resources officials noted in interviews, an “inventive” or “devious” manager can bend the rules by creating a new position with a different title but similar duties. That seems to have happened to Scott. A new position called director of curatorial initiatives that duplicates many of Scott’s duties as chief curator was created months before her dismissal.
Both Niro and Hill are “worried” about negative impacts on the Ottawa showing of the exhibition, Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch. The title comes from one of Niro’s best-known works, a 1992 photograph in the National Gallery’s collection. It shows the artist in a blonde wig, dressed like Marilyn Monroe in the film The Seven Year Itch. In the movie, Monroe stands over a subway grate as a train passes underneath, causing her dress to billow upwards seductively. Niro just used a fan on the floor to raise her skirt. Its title, The 500 Year Itch, refers to the years of European colonization in the Americas.
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Shelley Niro, “Chiquita 1,” 2021
digital photograph, 40” x 40” (collection of artist, courtesy Art Gallery of Hamilton)
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Shelley Niro, “Waitress,” 1987
oil on canvas, 36” x 48” (Art Gallery of Hamilton)
Much of Niro’s work plays with racial stereotypes. Other works in the show include Chiquita 1, a portrait of her mother; the oil painting Waitress, a self-portrait; and The Shirt, a 2003 digital video.
Niro is a recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and the Scotiabank Photography Award.
Hill’s departure also complicates planning for a large 2025 exhibition by Indigenous artists from around the globe, the third in a series of exhibitions, all spearheaded by Hill. These exhibitions were originally envisaged as occurring every five years or so. The first, in 2013, was called Sakahàn and the second was Àbadakone, in 2019-20. Both were widely praised.
Hill said he and Steven Loft, vice-president of the newly created department of Indigenous ways and decolonization, disagreed on the approach for that international show. Now, with Hill gone, who will identify art for the exhibition and arrange loans from Indigenous artists and institutions around the world? No one else at the gallery has Hill’s experience and contacts. Under a union contract at the gallery, managers, such as Loft, are forbidden from doing work ordinarily undertaken by people such as Hill, a unionized curator.
Most preparations for Niro’s show are done. She will be only the second First Nations woman – after Daphne Odjig – to have a solo show at the National Gallery. The show’s 80 works have been chosen and the 300-page catalogue is ready for the publisher. Yet to be decided is whether Hill will be brought back on contract to install the exhibition he has worked on for years.
“That’s exactly what I’m worried about,” says Hill.
The gallery had not resolved that issue when Hill was let go. If someone else is picked who is unfamiliar with the choice of works and the stories they are meant to tell, the show in Ottawa could look very different from what Hill and Niro envisaged.
Niro’s exhibition is a joint project of the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the Smithsonian’s New York branch of the National Museum of the American Indian. The National Gallery had agreed to provide “curatorial support” in the person of Hill. The other curators are Melissa Bennett, of Hamilton, and David W. Penny, of the Smithsonian. Bennett says the show opens May 27 at the Smithsonian, has its Canadian launch in Hamilton on Feb. 10, 2024, and then is slated to move to Ottawa for the summer of 2024, opening June 14 and continuing to Aug. 18. Later visits to other Canadian cities, including two in Western Canada, are expected to be announced soon.
The National Gallery’s public affairs department has refused to discuss anything about the Niro show. It would not confirm dates for the exhibition in Ottawa. Likewise, the gallery would not discuss who will assume Hill’s duties.
“The gallery has no announcement to make at this time,” said Josée-Britanie Mallet, senior media and public relations officer.
Hill was asked if there was any danger of the National Gallery cancelling its iteration of the Niro exhibition. “That would be a crappy move,” he said. “But I’ve been flabbergasted by the events that transpired in the last week, so I don’t know what to say any more.”
