Shelley Niro, The Shirt, 2003.Shelley Niro
In a series of 1998 photographic prints featuring the Statue of Liberty and colourful Indigenous beadwork, Mohawk artist Shelley Niro adds text that begins: “In my culture/there are no monuments/no man made structures/no tourist sites/one visits/burns tobacco/says a prayer.”
There is a certain irony to that claim because one of the first words one might use to describe the retrospective of Niro’s work now showing at the National Gallery of Canada is monumental.
The art is big and there’s a lot of it. Either Niro is working at scale, creating canvases the size of classic European history paintings, or she is working with quantity, producing both painted and photographic series that riff on a theme or an image multiple times. Sometimes she is doing both.
This major retrospective, initiated by the Art Gallery of Hamilton and marking a very belated first in the Six Nations artist’s 40-year career, fills the National Gallery’s special exhibition galleries just as emphatically as the Jean-Paul Riopelle retrospective did last year. (The show, co-organized with the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York where it began its tour last year, will also be seen in Vancouver and Saskatoon.)
Shelley Niro, 500 Year Itch, 1992.Shelley Niro
Niro is often a witty artist; she is rarely a subtle one. Take, for example, The Shirt of 2003, a series of large-scale photographs showing Navajo photographer and scholar Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie wearing a series of white T-shirts with a text recounting the history of colonialism in the bluntest terms: “My ancestors were annihilated, exterminated, murdered and massacred … and all’s I get is this shirt.” Spoiler alert: In the penultimate image Tsinhnahjinnie is shirtless and in the final image a white woman is now wearing that last T-shirt.
If the piece impresses as something more than a punch line, it’s because of the scale at which Niro has executed it, and the detail with which she has costumed and posed her two subjects, bookending them with views of the empty landscape behind them.
Niro will assert her identity and make her protest heard by being big and brassy, imposing physicality on her subject matter just as surely as any white man’s monument does. (The Shirt also exists in a video version and the exhibition includes a two-hour reel of Niro’s work in film and video. The multimedia artist has made everything from the 2023 feature film Café Daughter to small installations based on traditional beadwork.)
Even her most intimate works, smaller pieces often featuring her female relations, reveal the same strategy, humorous but unforgiving. In one colourized photographic series of 1991, she poses her mother and two sisters on a day out in Brantford, Ont., hamming it up in high heels, denim jackets and sunglasses in front of the statue of Joseph Brant, the chief who led Niro’s ancestors north from what is now New York State to the Haldimand Tract.
Elsewhere in the show, the gallery has helpfully provided a map of the tract granted to the Six Nations after the American Revolution in exchange for their loyalty to the British crown. Today’s reserve includes only a very small portion of the original land grant.
Shelley Niro, Flying Woman #9, 1994.Shelley Niro
This is where Niro grew up and from where she draws her power. In the 1980s, she commuted to Toronto to attend what was then called the Ontario College of Art because she “wanted to learn to draw a face.”
In one early painting included here, she depicts herself waiting tables, spilling a glass of wine, perhaps purposefully, on a startled white woman as then-prime minister Brian Mulroney and his wife Mila Mulroney waltz by, oblivious to a backdrop of flaming Indigenous masks. The painting is a compelling combination; its political statement so obvious and yet its observation of the white woman’s discomfort so acutely accurate.
Shelley Niro's Waitress, 1987Robert McNair/Shelley Niro
Since then, Niro’s painting, which includes both portraiture and landscape, has evolved into a powerfully naif style of flattened forms with clear outlines and bold colours. One strong example is Unbury My Heart, a suite of paintings depicting the four elements – air, water, earth and fire – with almost hallucinogenic intensity. They are installed above a carpet of 500 stuffed velvet hearts – the organ not the icon – directly linking Indigenous peoples’ continuance to nature.
In her more lyrical moments, the artist fashions a powerful champion of female continuance by adapting the creation myth of a woman who falls through a hole in the sky. Her Flying Woman series of the 1990s features manipulated black-and-white photographs with intriguing mirror images of the female figure soaring like an acrobat at the circus. In installations and paintings, she repeats the motif of the aviator’s leather hat, a symbol of intrepidity and preparedness.
Niro has often used herself as her subject, particularly in works that aim to counter stereotypes. In one series, she poses herself as costumed clichés – Santa Claus, Snow White, Marilyn Monroe with her white dress billowing up – and juxtaposes those with historical and ancestral photos, as well as straight photos of herself in street clothes. It’s the Marilyn Monroe image (from The Seven Year Itch) that gives this show its title: 500 Year Itch, in reference to the 500 years since Columbus’s arrival.
How are we to fix what has happened since? In a catalogue essay, Hamilton curator and artist Bryce Kanbara quotes activist Pamela Palmeter: “I never talk about reconciliation without talking about truth, justice and reconciliation. You won’t get that from hanging artwork in an office.” And then he writes, “We know what she means, but it’s a mistake to underestimate the persuasive impact [of] art …”
Art and art museums can provide a safe or even neutral place in which to consider hard stuff. Contemporary Indigenous art in Canada has very successfully harnessed Western notions of the avant-garde with both Western and Indigenous media to pursue themes of identity and colonization. As the artist turns 70, 500 Year Itch reveals Niro’s career as the precedent for a younger generation’s success.
500 Year Itch runs until Aug. 25 at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Its tour continues at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Sept. 27 to Feb. 17, and at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, April 4 to Aug. 31, 2025.