Exhibition showcases the many personas of Kanyen’kehà:ka artist Shelley Niro

Stepping into Shelley Niro’s retrospective art exhibition feels like encountering the artist’s many faces. 

She greets you in many forms: posing playfully as Marilyn Monroe; gazing over the Grand River, lost in ancestral memory; and exuding effortless cool behind a pair of sunglasses.

“You have to get over being too shy,” she quipped during a media tour at the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG). “Because no one wants to pose for you all the time.”

Her exhibition is the first major look back over the 40-year career of the Bay of Quinte Kanyen’kehá:ka (Mohawk) artist — featuring more than 70 works, from painting to beading to film. 

Launched last autumn at the VAG, Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch will remain on view for just one more month, set to close on Feb. 17. 

“We are honoured to be able to share this remarkable retrospective of Shelley Niro’s career with Vancouver,” said the gallery’s CEO and executive director, Anthony Kiendl, in a statement. 

Niro’s retrospective exhibition was organized by the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, with curatorial support from the National Gallery of Canada. 

It explores the full breadth of the artist’s prolific career, bringing together her works in formats that include beading, sculpture, photography, mixed media, and film — each piece anchored by her identity as a Kanyen’kehá:ka woman.

“Shelley is someone like her artworks,” said Greg Hill, also Kanyen’kehá:ka and one of the exhibition’s three curators, at a media tour last September.  “You just want to spend more time with them.” 

According to a catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, Niro says she grew up on the Six Nations reserve “surrounded by people who did delicate watercolour painting of men and women in their traditional Iroquois/Haudenosaunee clothing, people who made drums and raptors from traditional materials, bark and seeds … and those who continued to do beadwork.” 

This exposure rooted Niro in her culture as she began to make her journey through life in the arts.

In high school, Niro played saxophone with her reserve’s marching band before pivoting to cello — an adventurous shift that speaks to her versatility and talent for creative pursuits. Today, her cello playing can be heard woven throughout a number of her films. 

Although music was her early focus, she was always interested in visual art-making. In the early 1980s, after the birth of her two daughters, Niro enrolled in a graphic art course at Durham College in Oshawa, Ont. and began finding her way as an artist.

Before long, Niro gained confidence across a variety of mediums and developed a distinctive style that frequently references popular culture, showcasing her sharp wit and sense of humour.

Niro’s 1992 artwork for which her exhibition is named is a perfect example. Her gelatin silver (black-and-white) photograph, 500 Year Itch, refers to the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch starring Marilyn Monroe, who portrays a woman whose marriage begins to wane after seven years. 

Niro draws on the scene of Monroe standing over a subway grate with her dress blowing up. But in Niro’s riff on the iconic photograph, the gust comes from a visible electric fan — reinterpreting the image to explore the fraught, centuries-long relationship between Indigenous peoples and colonizers. 

Upon entering the exhibition on the third floor of the gallery, visitors encounter a triptych of large self-portraits. 

Abnormally Aboriginal feels puzzling at first glance. On the left, Niro stands in reading glasses and a black t-shirt that says “abnormally aboriginal,” with sideways letter ‘a’s, a double helix, and a depiction of an Indigenous man dividing the words.

“There’s so many words for us, but ‘Aboriginal’ is really one I wasn’t happy with,” she said, emphasizing the construction of the word”: “Ab-original.” 

In the center image, she wears black sunglasses and a shirt that reads “normal original.” On the right image, she appears without glasses, wearing a shirt displaying only a double helix.

“So often people think they know you based on what they’ve read,” Niro said, pointing to the triptych’s middle image. “But sunglasses give a sense of mystery — you don’t know me.”

In M: Stories of Women — a series of 10 digital photo-montage portraits of women, many of whom are her family members, Niro intertwines the Sky Woman creation story about the sacred role of women with the ongoing crisis resulting in Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. 

Reflecting on the series, Niro recounted a moment with her daughter, who was nine months pregnant and feeling frustrated. 

“I told her, come over and I’ll take some pictures,” she recalled. 

Niro’s portraits depict strong, beautiful, resilient women confronting the camera — framed within creative and distinct montages that challenge and deconstruct societal stereotypes of Indigenous women. 

500 Year Itch was curated by Greg Hill from the National Gallery of Canada, Melissa Bennett from the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and David Penney of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian — each of whom appears far more comfortable talking about Niro’s body of work than Niro does herself.

She’s modest, down to earth, and more instinctively wants to talk about what inspired the individual pieces than the bigger picture behind them all. She admits, “Sometimes I don’t know why I do these things, I just know it’s important to create.”  

During an exhibition tour, the curators offered a holistic overview of her artistic oeuvre — noting that Niro often draws on memories of place, the Mohawk valley, the American Revolution, as well as themes of finding beauty in grief, loss and dispossession. 

Another thing that resonates from her exhibition is the sense of Shelley Niro the artist, the lives of her relatives, and the profound failure of “Canada” to truly see them as individuals.

Inside a glass display case towards the start of the maze that is Niro’s retrospective, visitors will find three heart-shaped rocks placed on their own velvet “beds” surrounded by intricate beadwork. 

When asked about My Stone Cold Heart Needs a Bed Too, Shelley said simply: “I liked collecting them. I made little platforms for them so they can be seen.” 

Shelley Niro: A 500 Year Itch is on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery until February 17. Entrance to the gallery is free for Indigenous peoples. A glittery exhibition catalogue is also available, with contributions from Indigenous authors and curators.